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The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 


The 
Romance  of  the  Reaper 

By 

HERBERT  N.  CASSON 

Author  of  "  The  Romance  of  Steel." 


Illustrated  from 
Photographs 


"And  he  gave  it  for  his  opinion,  that  who- 
ever could  make  Xvo  ears  of  corn,  or  two 
blades  of  grass,  to  (;row  upon  a  spot  of 
ground  where  only  one  grew  before,  would 
deserve  better  of  mankind,  and  do  more 
essential  service  to  his  country,  than  the 
whole  race  of  politicians  put  together." 

—  Dtan  Swift. 


NEW  YORK 

Doubelday,  Page  &  Company 

1908 


Copyright,   1907,   1908,  B-sr 
Everybody's  Magazine 


Copyright,  1908,  by 

DouBLEDAY,  Page  &  Company 

Published,  May,   1908 


ALL  rights   reserved,  INCLUDING  THAT  OF    TRANSLATION 
INTO  POREIGN  LANGUAGES,   INCLUDING  THE  SCANDINAVIAN 


TO  THE  FARMERS  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES 
WHOSE  ENERGY  AND  PROGRESSIVENESS  HAVE 
MADE      THIS     WONDER-STORY      COME        TRUE 


PREFACE 

This  is  the  story  of  our  most  useful 
business.  It  is  a  medley  of  mechanics,  mil- 
lionaires, kings,  inventors  and  farmers;  and 
it  is  intended  for  the  average  man  and 
woman,  boy  and  girl.  Although  I  have 
taken  great  pains  to  make  this  book  accurate, 
I  have  written  it  in  the  fashion  of  romance, 
because  it  tells  a  story  that  every  American 
ought    to    know. 

The  fact  is  that  the  United  States  owes 
much  more  to  the  Reaper  than  it  owes  to 
the  factory  or  the  railroad  or  the  Wall  Street 
Stock  Exchange.  Without  the  magical  grain 
machinery  that  gives  us  cheap  bread,  the 
whole  new  structure  of  our  civilisation,  with 
all  its  dazzling  luxuries  and  refinements, 
would  be  withered  by  the  blight  of  Famine. 
This  may  sound  strange  and  sensational 
to  those  who  have  been  bred  in  the  cities, 
but  it  is  true. 

The  reaper  has  done  more  to  chase  the 


viii  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

wolf  from  the  door  —  to  abolish  poverty 
and  drudgery  and  hand-labour,  than  any 
other  invention  of  our  day.  It  has  done 
good  without  any  backwash  of  evil.  It  has 
not  developed  any  new  species  of  social 
parasite,  as  so  many  micdern  improvements 
have  done.  It  has  not  added  one  dollar 
to  the  unclean  hoard  of  a  stock-gambler,  nor 
turned  loose  upon  the  public  a  single  idle 
millionaire. 

The  reaper  is  our  best  guarantee  of  pros- 
perity. In  spite  of  our  periodical  panics, 
which  prove,  by  the  way,  that  the  men  who 
provide  us  with  banks  are  not  as  efficient 
as  the  men  who  provide  us  with  bread,  we 
are  certain  to  rebound  into  prosperity  and 
social  progress  as  long  as  we  continue  to  make 
three  hundred  harvesting  machines  every 
working  day  —  one  every  two  minutes.  The 
rising  flood  of  wheat  is  bound  to  submerge 
the  schemers  and  the  pessimists  alike. 

And  it  is  the  reaper,  too,  which  has  done 
most  to  make  possible  a  nobler  human  race, 
by  lessening  the  power  of  that  ancient  motive 
—  the  Search  for  Food.  Every  harvester  that 
clicks  its  way  through  the  yellow  grain 
means    more   than    bread.     It   means    more 


Preface  ix 

comfort,  more  travel,  more  art  and  music, 
more  books  and  education.  In  this  large 
fact  lies  the  real  Romance  of  the  Reaper. 

In  gathering  the  material  for  this  book 
I  have  been  greatly  assisted  by  Messrs. 
E.  J.  Baker,  of  the  Farm  Implement  News; 
B.  B.  Clarke,  of  the  American  Thresherman; 
Ralph  Emerson,  of  Rockford,  111;  C.  W. 
Marsh,  of  De  Kalb,  111.:  Edwin  D.  Metcalf 
and  T.  M.  Osborne,  of  Auburn,  N.  Y., 
Henry  Wallace,  of  Wallace's  Farmer,  William 
N.  Whiteley,  of  Springfield,  Ohio;  and  the 
officials  of  the  International  Harvester  Com- 
pany, who  made  it  possible  for  me  to  have 
free  access  to  all  of  its  works  and  to  famil- 
iarise myself  with  its  manner  of  doing 
business  in  this  country  and    abroad. 

Also,  I  take  pleasure  in  reproducing  the 
following  editorial  note  from  Everybody's 
Magazine,  in  which  four  chapters  of  this 
book  were  first  printed: 

"President  Roosevelt  in  his  message  of  December  3rd 
said:  'Modern  industrial  conditions  are  such  that  com- 
bination is  not  only  necessary,  but  inevitable  .  .  . 
Corporation  and  labour  union  alike  have  come  to  stay. 
Each,  if  properly  managed,  is  a  source  of  good,  and 
not  evil.'  If  capital  combinations  can  be  good,  there 
must  be  some  tliat  are  good.     Would  it  not  be  a  proper 


X  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

service  to  the  American  people  to  tell  them  of  a  trust 
that,  while  it  had  reaped  the  economical  advantages 
of  combination,  had  yet  played  fair  with  the  public 
and  with  its  competitors  ?  Hence  this  story  of  the 
great  Harvester  combine.  Before  we  began  to  publish 
Mr.  Casson's  articles,  we  followed  up  his  investigations 
with  a  thorough  inquiry  of  our  own,  and  we  are  bound 
to  say  that  the  business  methods  of  this  institution 
seem  to  conform  to  the  highest  standards  of  fair  play 
and  square  dealing.  The  International  Harvester 
combine  is  not  a  tariff  trust.  Its  members  surrendered 
dominance  in  their  own  business  only  when  the  trend 
of  'modern  industrial  conditions'  and  overstrenuous 
competition  made  combination  'not  only  necessary, 
but  inevitable.'  The  inside  history  of  the  'Morganis- 
ing'  of  this  group  of  fighters,  as  narrated  here,  is  as 
humorous  as  it  is  fascinating." 


CONTENTS 
Preface 


Vll 


I.     The  Story  of  McCormick      .      .  3 

II.     The  Story  of  Deering       ...  48 

III.  The      International     Harvester 

Company 90 

IV.  The  American  Harvester  Abroad  126 

V.     The  Harvester  and  the  American 

Farmer  161 


XI 


ILLUSTRATIONS 
A  Chicago  mower  in  Siberia    .     Frontispiece 


FACING  PAGE 


Cyrus  Hall  McCormick      ....  12 
The     Virginian     birthplace      of     the 

McCormick  reaper 22 

A  model  of  the  first  practical  reaper     .  27 

William  Deering 51 

William  N.  Whiteley          •       •       •       •  53 

C.  W.  Marsh 53 

John  F.  Appleby 53 

E.  H.  Gammon 53 

AsaS.  Bushnell 60 

Benjamin  H.  Warder         ....  60 

Hon.  Thomas  Mott  Osborne   ...  60 

David  M.  Osborne 60 

A  self-binder  in  Scotland,  with  the 
Wallace  Monument  in  the  back- 
ground            62 

Cyrus  Hall  McCormick,  Jr.     ...  85 

Charles  Deering §5 

xiii 


xlv  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 


FACING  PAGB 


Harold  McCormick 92 

J.  J.  Glessner 92 

W.  H.  Jones 92 

James  Deering 92 

American  self-binders  on  the  estate  of 

President  Fallieres,  in  France  .  .  135 
King   Alphonso    of   Spain    driving    an 

American  seeder 138 

Bismarck  having   his  first   view  of  an 

American  self-binder  ....  147 
An   American    harvester    at    work    in 

Argentina 151 

Gathering  in  a  Finland  harvest       .       .  154 

In  the  ancient  fields  of  Algiers        ,       .  158 


The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

CHAPTER  I 
The    Story    of    McCormick 

THIS  Romance  of  the  Reaper  is  a 
true  fairy  tale  of  American  life  — 
the  story  of  the  magicians  who  have  taught 
the  civilised  world  to  gather  in  its  harvests 
by   machinery. 

On  the  old  European  plan  —  snip  — 
snip  —  snipping  with  a  tiny  hand-sickle, 
every  bushel  of  wheat  required  three  hours 
of  a  man's  lifetime.  To-day,  on  the  new 
American  plan  —  riding  on  the  painted 
chariot  of  a  self-binding  harvester,  the  price 
of  wheat  has  been  cut  down  to  ten  minutes  a 
bushel. 

"When  I  first  went  into  the  harvest  field," 
so  an  Illinois  farmer  told  me,  "it  took  ten 
men  to  cut  and  bind  my  grain.  Now  our 
hired  girl  gets  on  the  scat  of  a  self-binder 
and  does  the  whole  business." 
3 


4  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

This  magical  machinery  of  the  wheat- 
field  solves  the  mystery  of  prosperity.  It 
explains  the  New  Farmer  and  the  miracles 
of  scientific  agriculture.  It  accounts  for 
the  growth  of  great  cities  with  their  steel 
mills  and  factories.  And  it  makes  clear 
how  we  in  the  United  States  have  become 
the  best  fed  nation  in  the  world. 

Hard  as  it  may  be  for  this  twentieth 
century  generation  to  believe,  it  is  true 
that  until  recently  the  main  object  of  all 
nations  was  to  get  bread.  Life  was  a  Search 
for  Food  —  a  desperate  postponement  of 
famine. 

Cut  the  Kings  and  their  retinues  out  of 
history  and  it  is  no  exaggeration  to  say 
that  the  human  race  was  hungry  for  ten 
thousand  years.  Even  of  the  Black  Bread 
—  burnt  and  dirty  and  coarse,  there  was 
not  enough;  and  the  few  who  were  well 
fed  took  the  food  from  the  mouths  of 
slaves.  Even  the  nations  that  grew  Galileo 
and  Laplace  and  Newton  were  haunted 
by  the  ghosts  of  Hunger.  Merrie  England 
was  famine-swept  in  1315,  1321,  1369, 
1438,  1482,  1527,  1630,  1661,  and  1709. 
To  have  enough  to  eat,  was  to  the  masses 


The   Story  of  McCormick  5 

of  all  nations  a  dream  —  a  Millennium  of 
Prosperity. 

This  long  Age  of  Hunger  outlived  the 
great  nations  of  antiquity.  Why  ?  Because 
they  went  at  the  problem  of  progress  in  the 
wrong  way. 

If  Marcus  Aurelius  had  invented  the 
reaper,  or  if  the  Gracchi  had  been  inven- 
tors instead  of  politicians,  the  story  of 
Rome  would  have  had  a  happier  ending. 
But  Rome  said:  The  first  thing  is  em- 
pire. Egypt  said:  The  first  thing  is  fame. 
Greece  said:  The  first  thing  is  genius.  Not 
one  of  them  said:     The  first  thing;  is  Bread. 

In  the  Egyptian  quarter  of  the  British 
Museum,  standing  humbly  in  a  glass  case 
between  two  mummied  Pharaohs,  is  a 
little  group  of  farm  utensils.  A  fractured 
wooden  plough,  a  rusted  sickle,  two  sticks 
tied  together  with  a  leathern  thong,  and 
several  tassels  that  had  hung  on  the  horns 
of  the  oxen.  A  rummaging  professor  found 
these  in  the  tomb  of  Seti  I.,  who  had  his  will 
on  the  banks  of  the  Nile  three  thousand 
years  ago.  Egypt  had  a  most  elaborate 
government  at  that  tim.e.  She  had  an 
army  and  navy,  an  art  and  literature.     Yet 


6  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

her   bread-tools   were   no   better   than   those 
of  the   barbarians  whom   she   despised. 

It  is  one  of  the  most  baffling  mysteries  of 
history,  that  agriculture  —  the  first  industry 
to  be  learned,  was  the  last  one  to  be  devel- 
oped. For  thousands  of  years  the  wise  men 
of  the  world  absolutely  ignored  the  prob- 
lems of  the  farm.  A  farmer  remained 
either  a  serf  or  a  tenant.  He  was  a  stolid 
drudge  —  "brother  to  the  ox."  Even  the 
masterful  old  Pilgrim  Fathers  had  no  ploughs 
at  all  —  nothing  but  hoes  and  sharp  sticks, 
for  the  first  twelve  years  of  their  pioneering. 

Fifty-five  years  of  American  Independence 
went  by  before  the  first  reaper  clicked  its 
way  clumsily  into  fame,  on  a  backwoods 
farm  in  Virginia.  At  that  time,  1831,  the 
American  people  were  free,  but  they  held  in 
their  hands  the  land-tools  of  slaves.  They 
had  to  labour  and  sweat  in  the  fields,  with 
the  crude  implements  that  had  been  pro- 
duced by  ages  of  slavery.  For  two  genera- 
tions they  tried  to  build  up  a  prosperous 
Republic  with  sickles,  flails,  and  wooden 
ploughs,  and  they  failed. 

There  are  men  and  women  now  alive 
who  can  remember  the  hunger  year  of  1837, 


The  Story  of  McCormick  7 

when  there  were  wheat  bounties  in  Maine 
and  bread  riots  in  New  York  City,  Flour 
mills  were  closed  for  lack  of  wheat.  Starv- 
ing men  fell  in  the  streets  of  Boston  and 
Philadelphia.  Mobs  of  labourers,  mad- 
dened by  the  fear  of  famine,  broke  into  ware- 
houses and  carried  away  sacks  of  food  as 
though  they  were  human  wolves.  Even  in 
the  Middle  West  —  the  prairie  paradise  of 
farmers — many  a  family  fought  against 
Death  with  the  serf's  Vv^eapon  of  Black 
Bread. 

Enterprise  was  not  then  an  American 
virtue.  The  few  men  who  dared  to  suggest 
improvements  were  persecuted  as  enemies 
of  society.  The  first  iron  ploughs  were  said 
to  poison  the  soil.  The  first  railroad  was 
torn  up.  The  first  telegraph  wires  were  cut. 
The  first  sewing-machine  was  smashed. 
And  the  first  man  who  sold  coal  in  Philadel- 
phia was  chased  from  the  State  as  a  swindler. 

Even  the  railway  was  a  dangerous  toy. 
The  telegraph  was  still  a  dream  in  the  brain 
of  Morse.  John  Deere  had  not  invented 
his  steel  plough,  nor  Howe  his  sewing-machine, 
nor  Hoe  his  printing-press.  There  were 
no  stoves  nor  matches  nor  oil-lamps.     Petro- 


8  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

leum  was  peddled  as  a  medicine  at  a  dollar 
a  bottle.  Iron  was  $75  a  ton.  Money  was 
about  as  reliable  as  mining  stocks  are  to-day; 
and  all  the  savings  in  all  the  banks  would 
not  now  buy  the   chickens   in   Iowa. 

Our  total  exports  were  not  more  than  we 
paid  last  year  for  diamonds  and  champagne. 
Chicago  was  a  twelve-family  village.  There 
was  no  West  nor  Middle  West.  Not  one 
grain  of  wheat  had  been  grown  in  Minne- 
sota, the  Dakotas,  Nebraska,  Colorado, 
Kansas,  Washington,  Nevada,  Idaho,  Mon- 
tana, New  Mexico,  Oregon,  Utah,  Arizona, 
Wyoming,  Oklahoma  or  Texas. 

The  whole  structure  of  civilisation,  as  we 
know  it,  was  unbuilt;  and  most  of  its  archi- 
tects and  builders  were  unborn  or  in  the 
cradle.  Spencer  was  eleven  years  of  age; 
Virchow  was  ten;  Pasteur  nine;  Huxley  six; 
Berthelot  four;  and  as  for  Haeckel,  Carnegie, 
Morgan,  Edison  and  their  generation,  they 
had  not  yet  appeared  in  the  land  of  the 
living. 

Then  came  the  Reaper. 

This  unappreciated  machine,  about  which 
so  little  has  been  written,  changed  the  face 
of  the  world.     It  moved  the  civilised  nations 


The  Story  of  McCormick  9 

up  out  of  the  bread  line.  It  made  pros- 
perity possible;  and  elevated  the  whole 
struggle  for  existence  to  a   higher   plane. 

Life  is  still  a  race  —  always  will  be;  but 
not  for  bread.  The  lowest  prizes  now  are 
gold  watches  and  steam  yachts  and  auto- 
mobiles. Even  the  hobo  at  the  back  door 
scorns  bread,  unless  we  apologise  for  it 
with  meat  and  jam. 

It  is  so  plentiful  —  this  clean,  white  bread, 
that  it  is  scarcely  an  article  of  commerce 
any  longer.  In  our  hotels  it  is  thrown  in 
free  of  charge,  as  though  it  were  a  pinch 
of  salt  or  a  glass  of  water.  There  is  no 
"penn'orth  of  bread"  in  the  bill,  as  there  was 
in  FalstafF's  day. 

Seven  bushels  of  wheat  apiece!  That 
is  what  we  eighty-five  million  people  ate  in 
1906  —  twelve  thousand  million  loaves  of 
bread.  Such  a  year  of  feasting  was  new 
in  the  history  of  the  world.  And  yet  we  sent 
a  thousand  million  dollars'  worth  of  food 
to  other  nations. 

Suppose  that  bread  were  money,  just 
for  one  day!  What  a  lesson  it  would  be  on 
the  social  value  of  the  reaper!  Thirty  loaves 
would   be   the    day's    pay   of   a    labourer  — 


10  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

as  much  as  he  could  carry  on  his  back. 
Two  loaves  for  a  cigar  —  three  for  a  shave  — 
five  for  a  bunch  of  violets  —  forty  for  a 
theatre  ticket  —  a  hundred  for  a  bottle  of 
champagne!  Is  there  anything  cheaper  than 
bread  ? 

The  reaper  was  America's  answer  to 
Malthus  —  who  scared  England  into  abolish- 
ing the  Corn  Laws  by  his  proclamation  that 
"the  ultimate  check  to  population  is  the 
lack  of  food."  What  would  that  well- 
meaning  pessimist  think  were  he  now  alive, 
if  he  were  told  that  the  human  race  is  grow- 
ing wheat  at  the  rate  of  ten  bushels  a  year 
per  family  ?  Or  that  Minnesota  and  the 
Dakotas  (names  that  the  world  of  his  day 
had  never  heard)  produce  enough  wheat 
to   feed   all   the   people   of  England  ? 

The  reaper  was  America's  answer  to  the 
world's  demand  for  democracy.  Instead  of 
bread  riots  and  red  flags  and  theories  of  an 
earthly  paradise  in  which  nobody  worked 
but  the  Government,  the  United  States  in- 
vented a  machine  that  gave  democracy  a 
chance.  Instead  of  a  guillotine  to  cut  off 
the  heads  of  the  privileged  people  who  ate 
too  much,   it   produced   a   reaper  that  gave 


The  Story  of  McCormick  li 

everybody  enough.  This  was  not  a  com- 
plete answer,  nor  will  there  ever  be  one, 
to  the  riddle  of  liberty,  equality  and  frater- 
nity. But  it  was  so  much  better  than  theories 
and  riots  that  it  helped  to  persuade  twenty-five 
million  immigrants  to  cross  the  ocean  "and  be- 
come shareholders  in  the  American  Republic. 

If  it  were  possible  to  trace  back  a  strand 
in  the  twisted  thread  of  cause  and  effect, 
we  would  find  that  many  a  factory  and  steel- 
mill  owes  its  origin  to  the  flood  of  wheat- 
money  that  came  to  us  from  Europe  in  1880 
and  1881  — every  dollar  of  it  made  by  the 
humble  harvester. 

Without  this  obedient  slave  of  wood  and 
steel,  all  our  railroads  and  skyscrapers  and 
automobiles  could  not  save  us  from  famine. 
If  we  had  to  reap  our  grain  in  the  same  way 
as  the  Romans  did,  it  would  take  half  the 
men  in  the  United  States  to  feed  us  on 
bread  alone,  to  say  nothing  of  the  rest  ot 
the  menu. 

Like  most  great  things,  the  reaper  was 
born  among  humble  people  and  in  a  humble 
way.  It  was  crude  at  first  and  dogged  by 
failure.  No  one  man  made  it.  It  was  the 
product  of  a  hundred   brains. 


12  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

The  exact  truth  about  its  origin  is  not 
known  and  never  will  be.  What  few  facts 
there  were  have  been  torn  and  twisted  by 
the  bitter  feuds  of  the  Patent  Office.  Every 
letter  and  document  that  exists  is  controver- 
sial. So  I  cannot  say  that  the  story,  as 
I  give  it,  is  entirely  true,  but  only  that  it  is 
as  near  as  I  can  get  to  the  truth  after  six 
months  of  investigation. 

There  is  evidence  to  show  that  Cyrus  Hall 
McCormick  completed  a  practical  reaper  in 
1831,  although  the  first  reaper  patent  was 
taken  out  in  1833  by  an  inventive  seaman 
named  Obed  Hussey,  of  Baltimore.  The 
young  McCormick  did  not  secure  his  patent 
until  1834  ;  but  he  had  given  a  public  exhi- 
bition in  Virginia  three  years  before. 

There  were  nearly  a  hundred  people  who 
saw  this  exhibition.  Not  one  of  them  is 
now  alive;  and  the  story  as  told  by  their 
children  has  many  little  touches  of  imagi- 
nation. But  in  the  main,  it  is  very  likely 
to  be  true. 

It  was  in  the  fall  of  1831  when  Cyrus 
McCormick  hitched  four  horses  to  his 
unwieldy  machine  and  clattered  out  of 
the  barnyard  into  a  field  of  wheat  nearby. 


1.  \  1 , 1  -   1 1  \  1 


The  Story  of  McCormick  13 

Horses  shied  and  pranced  at  the  absurd 
object,  which  was  unhke  anything  else  on 
the  face  of  the  earth.  Dogs  barked.  Small 
boys  yelled.  Farmers,  whose  backs  were 
bent  and  whose  fingers  were  scarred  from 
the  harvest  labour,  gazed  with  contemptuous 
curiosity  at  the  queer  contraption  which 
was   expected   to   cut   grain   without   hands. 

A  little  group  of  Negro  slaves  had  spasms 
of  uncomprehending  delight  in  one  corner 
of  the  field,  not  one  of  them  guessing  that 
"Massa"  McCormick's  comical  machine 
was  cutting  at  the  chains  that  bound  their 
children.  And  a  noisy  crowd  of  white 
labourers  followed  the  reaper  up  and  down 
the  field  with  boisterous  enmity;  for  here 
was  an  invention  which  threatened  to  de- 
prive them  of  the  right  to  work  —  the  pre- 
cious right  to  work  sixteen  hours  a  day  for 
three  cents  an  hour. 

The  field  was  hilly  and  the  reaper  worked 
badly.  It  slewed  and  jolted  along,  cutting 
the  grain  very  irregularly.  Seeing  this, 
the  owner  of  the  field  —  a  man  who  was 
RufF  by  name  and  rough  by  nature,  rushed 
up  to  McCormick  and  shouted  —  "Here! 
This   won't   do.     Stop   your   horses!     Your 


14  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

machine  is  rattling  the  heads  off  my  wheat." 
"It's  a  humbug,"  bawled  one  of  the 
labourers.  "Give  me  the  old  cradle  yet, 
boys!"  exclaimed  a  round-shouldered  farmer. 
The  Negroes  turned  handsprings  with  delight; 
and  the  whole  jeering  mob  gathered  around 
the  discredited  machine. 

Just  then  a  fine-looking  man  rode  up  on 
horseback.  The  crowd  made  way  as  he 
came  near,  for  they  recognised  him  as  the 
Honourable  William  Taylor  —  a  conspic- 
uous politician  of  that  day. 

"  Pull  down  the  fence  and  cross  over  into 
my  field,"  he  said  to  young  McCormick. 
"I  '11  give  you  a  fair  chance  to  try  your 
machine." 

McCormick  quickly  accepted  the  offer, 
drove  into  Taylor's  field,  which  was  not  as 
hilly,  and  cut  the  grain  successfully  for 
four  or  five  hours.  Although  the  United 
States  had  been  established  more  than 
fifty  years  before,  this  was  the  first  grain 
that  had  ever  been  cut  by  machinery.  The 
Fathers  of  the  Republic  had  eaten  the  bread 
of  hand-labour  all  their  lives,  and  never 
dreamed  that  the  human  race  would  ever  find 
a  better  way. 


The  Story  of  McCormick  15 

When  he  arrived  home  that  evening, 
Cyrus  thought  that  his  troubles  were  over. 
He  had  reaped  six  acres  of  wheat  in  less 
than  half  a  day  —  as  much  as  six  men 
would  have  done  by  the  old-fashioned 
method.  He  had  been  praised  as  well  as 
jeered  at.  "Your  reaper  is  a  success," 
said  his  father,  "and  it  makes  me  feel  proud 
to  have  a  son  do  what  I  could  not  do." 

Two  Big  Men  had  given  him  their  ap- 
proval —  William  Taylor  and  a  Professor 
Bradshaw,  of  the  Female  Academy  in  the 
town  of  Lexington,  Virginia.  The  professor, 
who  was  a  pompous  and  positive  individual, 
made  a  solemn  investigation  of  the  reaper, 
and  then  announced,  in  slow%  loud,  and 
emphatic  tones  —  "That  —  machine  —  is  — 
worth  —  a  hundred  —  thousand  —  dollars." 

But  if  Cyrus  McCormick  hoped  to  wake 
up  the  following  morning  and  find  himself 
rich  and  famous,  he  was  roughly  disap- 
pointed. The  local  excitement  soon  died 
out,  and  in  a  few  days  the  men  in  the  village 
store  were  discussing  Webster's  last  speech 
against  Nullification  and  Andrew  Jackson's 
war  against  the  bankers.  One  old  woman 
expressed  the  general  feeling  by  saying  that 


l6  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

young  McCormick's  reaper  was  "a  right 
smart  curious  sort  of  thing,  but  it  won't 
come  to  much.'* 

McCormick  was  at  this  time  a  youth  of 
twenty-two.  He  had  been  one  of  four  pink, 
helpless  babies,  born  in  1809,  who  became, 
each  in  his  own  world,  the  greatest  leader 
of  his  day  —  Darwin,  Gladstone,  Lincoln, 
and  McCormick.  Like  Lincoln,  McCor- 
mick first  learned  to  breathe  in  a  long  cabin  — 
but  in  Virginia.  He  was  bred  from  a  fight- 
ing race.  His  father  had  wrenched  a  living 
from  the  rocks  of  Virginia  for  his  family  of 
nine.  His  grandfather  had  fought  the  Eng- 
lish in  the  Revolution.  His  great-grand- 
father had  been  an  Indian  fighter  in  Penn- 
sylvania; and  his  great-great-grandfather 
battled  with  a  flint-lock  against  the  soldiers 
of  James  H.,  at  the  siege  of  Londonderry. 

The  McCormick  family,  in  1809,  had  a 
good  deal  of  what  was  then  called  prosperity. 
They  had  enough  to  eat  —  a  roof  that  kept 
out  the  rain  —  1,800  acres  of  land,  or  near- 
land  —  three  saw-mills  —  two  flour-mills,  and 
a  distillery.  They  had  very  little  money, 
because  there  was  little  to  be  had.  In  the 
whole    United    States   there   was    barely   as 


The  Story  of  McCormick  1/ 

much  money  as  would  buy  half  of  the  New 
York  Subway. 

The  first  American  McCormicks  had  a 
thousand  dollars  or  more  when  they  resolved 
to  leave  Ireland,  and  they  were  Scotch 
enough  to  invest  the  whole  amount  in  linen, 
which  they  sold  at  a  high  profit  in  Philadel- 
phia. This  capital  enabled  them  to  acquire 
a  small  stock  of  books,  tools,  and  comforts, 
which  were  passed  along  from  father  to 
son. 

Robert  McCormick  —  the  father  of  Cyrus, 
was  himself  a  remarkable  Virginian.  He 
was  quick  with  his  hands  in  shaping  iron 
and  wood.  In  fact,  he  was  fairly  famous 
in  his  county  as  the  inventor  of  a  hemp- 
brake,  a  clover-sheller,  a  bellows  and 
threshing  machine.  His  mind  was  greedy 
for  know^ledge;  and  it  was  his  habit,  when 
the  seven  children  were  asleep,  to  explore 
into  the  mysteries  of  astronomy  until  his 
candle  had  flickered  its  life  out.  Twenty 
or  more  of  his  letters,  which  I  have  seen, 
are  well  written  and  with  a  fine  use  of  book- 
ish words. 

The  one  persistent  ambition  of  his  life 
was  to  invent  a  reaper.     It  is  also  true,  and 


1 8  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

a  titbit  of  a  fact  for  those  who  beUeve  in 
prenatal  influences,  that  during  the  year 
in  which  Cyrus  H.  McCormick  was  born, 
his  father  first  began  the  actual  construction 
of  a  reaping  machine. 

Especially  during  the  harvest  rnonths, 
the  topic  of  conversation  in  the  McCormick 
home  was  whether  the  dream  of  "reaping 
grain  with  horses"  could  ever  come  true. 
"Reaper,"  was  one  of  the  first  words  that 
baby  Cyrus  learned  to  say;  and  his  favourite 
play-toy,  when  he  grew  older,  was  the  wreck 
of  his  father's  reaper  that  would  n't  reap, 
which  lay  in  rusty  disgrace  near  the  barn- 
door. 

"Often  I  have  seen  Robert  McCormick 
standing  over  his  machine,"  said  one  of  his 
neighbours.  "He  would  be  studying  and 
thinking,  drawing  down  his  under  lip,  as 
was  his  habit  when  he  was  puzzling  over 
anything."  His  friends  ridiculed  him  for 
wasting  so  much  time  on  a  fooHsh  toy,  until 
he  became  half  ashamed  of  it  himself  and 
quit  his  experimenting  in  the  daytime. 
But  at  night,  he  and  Cyrus  hammered  away 
in  the  little  log  workshop,  as  though  they 
were  a  pair  of  conspirators. 


The  Story  of  McCormick  19 

The  romantic  mystery  of  these  midnight 
labours  made  an  indehble  mark  on  the  brain 
of  the  boy  Cyrus.  He  grew  up  to  be  serious 
and  self-contained  —  quite  unlike  the  boys 
of  the  neighbourhood.  He  was  not  popular 
and  never  cared  to  be. 

"Cyrus  was  a  natural  mechanical  genius 
from  a  child,"  said  John  Cash,  who  worked 
on  the  McCormick  farm.  "He  invented 
the  best  hillside  plough  ever  used  in  this  coun- 
try. He  and  his  father  would  lock  themselves 
up  in  the  shop  and  work  for  hours  on  a 
reaping  machine.  The  neighbours  thought 
they  were  both  unbalanced  to  have  the 
idea  of  cutting  grain  with  horses." 

Cyrus  was  always  busy  making  or  mending 
some  piece  of  machinery.  He  abhorred 
the  drudgery  of  the  farm;  but  delighted  in 
any  work  that  had  an  idea  behind  it.  He 
surprised  his  teacher  one  morning  by  bring- 
ing to  school  a  twenty-inch  globe  of  wood, 
which  turned  on  its  axis  as  the  earth  does, 
and  had  the  seas  and  continents  outlined 
in  ink. 

"That  young  fellow  is  ahead  of  me," 
said  the   amazed  teacher. 

At  fifteen  Cyrus  had  invented  a  new  grain 


20  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

cradle.  At  twenty-one  he  improved  a  ma- 
chine which  his  father  had  made  to  break 
hemp.  And  at  twenty-two  this  young 
country-boy,  who  had  never  seen  a  college, 
a  city,  or  a  railroad,  constructed  the  first 
practical  American  reaper.  It  was  a  clumsy 
makeshift  —  as  crude  as  a  Red  River  ox- 
cart; but  it  was  built  on  the  right  lines.  It 
was  not  at  all  handsome  or  well  made  or 
satisfactory;  but  it  was  a  reaper  that  reaped. 

But  McCormick  soon  discovered  that  it 
was  not  enough  to  invent  a  reaper.  What 
the  world  needed  was  a  man  who  was  strong 
and  dominating  enough  to  force  his  reaper 
upon  the  unwilling  labourers  of  the  har- 
vest fields. 

Tenacity!  Absolute  indifference  to  defeat! 
The  lust  for  victory  that  makes  a  man 
unconscious  of  the  blows  he  gives  or  takes! 
This  was  what  was  needed,  and  what  Cyrus 
McCormick  possessed,  to  a  greater  degree, 
perhaps,  than  any  other  man  in  American 
history. 

Tenacity!  It  was  in  his  blood.  Back  of 
him  was  the  hardiest  breed  that  was  ever 
mixed  into  the  American  blend  —  the  pick 
of  the    Scots    who  fought  their  way  to  the 


The   Story  of  McCormick  21 

United  States  by  way  of  Ireland.  These 
Irish  Scots,  few  as  they  were,  led  the  way 
across  the  Alleghanics,  founded  Pittsburgh, 
made  a  trail  to  Texas,  and  put  five  Presi- 
dents in  the  White  House. 

And  tenacity  was  bred,  as  well  as  born, 
into  Cyrus  McCormick.  He  went  bare- 
footed as  a  boy,  not  for  lack  of  shoes,  but  to 
make  him  tough.  "I  want  my  boys  to  know 
how  to  endure  hardship,"  said  his  mother. 
He  sat  on  a  slab  bench  in  the  little  log  school 
house  and  learned  to  read  from  the  Book  of 
Genesis.  He  sang  Psalms  with  forty  verses, 
on  Sundays,  and  sat  as  still  as  a  graven 
image  during  the  three-hour  sermons,  for 
his  father  was  a  Presbyterian  of  the  old 
Covenanter  brand. 

So  it  came  to  pass  that  Cyrus  McCormick 
clung  to  his  reaper,  as  John  Knox  had  to  his 
Bible.  "His  whole  soul  was  wrapped  up  in 
it,"  said  one  of  his  neighbours.  He  grew 
as  indifferent  to  the  rough  jokes  of  the 
farmers  as  Martin  Luther  was  to  the  sneers 
of  the  village  priests.  The  making  of 
reapers  became  more  than  a  business.  It 
was  a  creed  —  a  religion  —  a  new  eleventh 
commandment. 


22  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

By  the  time  he  was  thirty,  he  had  become 
a  nineteenth  century  Mohammed,  ready  for  a 
world  crusade.  His  war-cry  was  —  Great 
is  the  Reaper,  and  McCormick  is  its  prophet. 

Like  Mohammed,  he  had  his  visions  of 
future  glory.  On  one  occasion,  while  riding 
on  horseback  through  a  wilderness  path, 
the  dazzling  thought  flashed  upon  his  mind  — 
"Perhaps  I  may  make  a  million  dollars 
from  this  reaper."  This  idea  remained  for 
years  the  driving  wheel  of  his  brain. 

"The  thought  was  so  enormous,"  he  said 
afterward,  "that  it  seemed  like  a  dream  — 
like  dwelling  in  the  clouds  —  so  remote,  so 
unattainable,  so  exalted,  so  visionary." 

Also,  Hke  Mohammed,  he  had  a  period  of 
preparatory  solitude.  Soon  after  the  first 
exhibition  of  his  reaper,  he  bought  a  tract  of 
land  and  farmed  it  alone,  with  two  aged 
Negroes  as  housekeepers.  Here  he  lived 
for  more  than  a  year  with  no  companion 
except  his  reaper.  He  seemed  at  this  time, 
too,  to  have  resolved  upon  a  life  of  celibacy, 
for  I  find  in  one  of  his  letters  an  allusion  to 
two  young  ladies  of  unusual  attractiveness. 
"They  are  pretty,  smart  and  rich,"  he  writes, 
"  but  alas,  I  have  other  business  to  attend  to!  ' 


The  Story  of  McCormick  23 

The  two  things  of  which  he  stood  most 
in  need  were  money  and  cheaper  iron.  So, 
after  thinking  over  the  situation  in  his  lonely 
cabin,  he  decided  to  build  a  furnace  and 
make  his  own  iron.  His  father  and  a 
neighbour  joined  him  in  the  enterprise. 
They  built  the  furnace,  made  the  iron,  and 
might  have  forgotten  the  reaper,  if  the 
financial  earthquake  of  1839  had  not  shaken 
them  down  into  the  general  wreckage.  The 
neighbour  who  had  been  made  a  partner 
signed  over  his  property  to  his  mother,  and 
threw  the  whole  burden  of  the  bankruptcy 
upon  the  McCormick  family,  crushing 
them  for  a  time  into  an  abyss  of  debt  and 
poverty. 

Cyrus  McCormick  gave  up  everything 
he  owned  to  the  creditors  —  everything  ex- 
cept his  reaper,  which  nobody  wanted.  So 
far  his  vision  of  wealth  was  still  a  dream. 
Instead  of  being  the  possessor  of  a  million, 
he  was  eight  years  older,  and   penniless. 

There  were  four  sons  and  three  daughters 
in  the  family,  and  the  nine  of  them  slaved 
for  five  years  to  save  the  homestead  from  the 
auctioneer.  Once  the  sheriff  rode  up  with  a 
writ,  but  was  so  deeply  impressed  with  their 


24  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

energy  and  uprightness  that  he  rode  away 
with  the  dreaded  paper  still  in  his  pocket- 
Up  to  this  time  Cyrus  had  not  sold  one 
reaper.  As  Mohammed  preached  for  ten  years 
without  converting  anyone  except  his  own 
relatives,  so  Cyrus  McCormick  preached 
the  gospel  of  the  reaper  for  ten  years  without 
success.  Then,  in  1841,  he  sold  two  for 
^100  apiece.  The  next  year  seven  daring 
farmers  came  to  the  McCormick  homestead, 
each  with  ^100  in  his  hands. 

This  brilliant  success  brought  the  whole 
family  into  line  behind  Cyrus,  and  the  farm 
was  transformed  into  a  reaper  factory. 
Twenty-nine  machines,  "fearfully  and 
wonderfully  made,"  were  sold  in  1843,  and 
fifty  in  1844.  There  were  troubles,  of 
course.  Some  buyers  failed  to  pay.  A 
workman  who  was  sent  out  on  horseback 
to  collect  $300,  ran  away  with  horse,  money 
and  all.  But  none  of  these  things  moved 
Cyrus.  At  last,  after  thirteen  years  of  delay, 
he  was  selling  reapers. 

Best  of  all,  an  order  for  eight  had  come 
from  Cincinnati.  These  were  the  first  rea- 
pers that  were  sold  outside  of  Virginia. 
They  were   seen   by   the   more    enterprising 


The  Story  of  McCormick  25 

farmers  of  Ohio  and  created  a  sensation 
wherever  they  were  used.  Cyrus,  who  was 
now  a  powerful,  broad-chested  man  of  thirty- 
six,  caught  a  gHmpse  of  his  opportunity 
and  sprang  to  seize  it.  He  saw  that  the 
time  had  come  to  leave  the  backwoods 
farm  —  forty  miles  from  a  blacksmith  — 
sixty  miles  from  a  canal  —  one  hundred 
miles  from  a  railway.  So,  with  ^300  in  his 
belt,  he  set  out  on  horseback  for  the  West. 

Here  he  saw  the  prairies.  To  a  man  who 
had  spent  his  life  in  a  hollow  of  the  Allegha- 
nies,  the  West  was  a  new  world.  It  was  the 
natural  home  of  the  reaper.  The  farmers 
of  Virginia  might  continue  forever  to  harvest 
their  small,  hilly  fields  by  hand,  but  here  — 
in  this  vast  land  ocean,  with  few  labourers 
and  an  infinity  of  acres,  the  reaper  was  as 
indispensable  as  the  plough.  To  reap  even 
one  of  these  new  States  by  hand  would 
require  the  whole  working  population  of 
the  country. 

Also,  in  Illinois,  McCormick  saw  what 
made  his  Scotch  heart  turn  cold  within 
him  —  he  saw  hogs  and  cattle  feeding  in  the 
autumn  wheat-fields,  which  could  not  be 
reaped  for  lack  of  labourers.     Five  million 


26  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

bushels  of  wheat  had  grown  and  ripened  — 
enough  to  empty  the  horn  of  plenty  into 
every  farmer's  home.  Men  and  women, 
children  and  grandmothers,  toiled  day  and 
night  to  gather  in  the  yellow  food.  But  the 
short  harvest-season  rushed  past  so  quickly 
that  tons  of  it  lay  rotting  under  the  hoofs 
of  cattle. 

It  was  a  puzzling  problem.  It  was  too 
much  prosperity  —  a  new  trouble  for  farmers. 
In  Europe,  men  had  been  plenty  and  acres 
scarce.  Here,  acres  were  plenty  and  men 
scarce.  Ripe  grain  —  the  same  in  all  coun- 
tries, will  not  wait.  Unless  it  is  gathered 
quickly  —  in  from  four  to  ten  days,  it  breaks 
down  and  decays.  So,  even  to  the  dullest 
minds,  it  was  clear  that  there  must  be  some 
better  way  of  snatching  in  the  ripened  grain. 

The  sight  of  the  trampled  wheat  goaded 
McCormick  almost  into  a  frenzy  of  activity. 
He  rode  on  horseback  through  Illinois, 
Wisconsin,  Missouri,  Ohio,  and  New  York, 
proclaiming  his  harvest  gospel  and  looking 
for  manufacturers  who  would  build  his 
reapers.  From  shop  to  shop  he  went  with 
the  zeal  of   a  Savonarola. 

One  morning,  in  the  little  town  of  Brock- 


1 


The  Story  of  McCormick  2/ 

port,  New  York,  he  found  the  first  practical 
men  who  appreciated  his  invention  —  Dayton 
S.  Morgan  and  William  H.  Seymour.  Mor- 
gan was  a  handy  young  machinist  who  had 
formed  a  partnership  with  Seymour  —  a 
prosperous  store-keeper.  They  Hstened  to 
McCormick  with  great  interest  and  agreed 
to  make  a  hundred  reapers.  By  this  decision 
they  both  later  became  milHonaires,  and 
also  entered  history  as  the  founders  of  the 
first   reaper   factory   in   the   world. 

Altogether,  in  the  two  years  after  he  left 
Virginia,  McCormick  sold  240  reapers.  This 
was  Big  Business;  but  it  was  only  a  morsel 
in  proportion  to  his  appetite.  Neither  was 
it  satisfactory.  He  found  himself  tangled 
in  a  snarl  of  trouble  because  of  bad  iron, 
stupid  workmen,  and  unreliable  manufac- 
turers. He  cut  the  Gordian  knot  by  building 
a  factory  of  his  own   at  Chicago. 

This  was  one  of  the  wisest  decisions  of 
his  life,  though  at  the  time  it  appeared  to  be 
a  disastrous  mistake.  Chicago,  in  1847, 
showed  no  signs  of  its  present  greatness. 
As  a  city,  it  was  a  ten-year-old  experiment, 
built  in  a  swamp,  without  a  railway  or  a 
canal.     It  was  ugly  and  dirty,  with  a  river 


28  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

that  ran  in  the  wrong  direction;  but  it  was 
busy.  It  was  the  Hnk  between  the  Missis- 
sippi and  the  Great  Lakes  —  a  central 
market  where  wheat  was  traded  for  lumber 
and  furs  for  iron.  It  had  no  history  —  no 
ancient  families  clogging  up  the  streets  with 
their  special  privileges.  And  best  of  all, 
it  was  a  place  where  a  big  new  idea  was 
actually  preferred  to  a  small  old  one, 

Chicago  did  not  look  at  McCormick  with 
dead  eyes  and  demand  a  certified  cheque 
from  his  ancestors.  It  sized  him  up  in  a 
few  swift  glances  and  saw  a  thick-set,  ruddy 
man,  with  the  physique  of  a  heavy-weight 
wrestler,  dark  hair  that  waved  in  glossy 
furrows,  and  strong  eyes  that  struck  you 
like  a  blow.  It  glanced  at  his  reaper  and 
saw  a  device  to  produce  more  wheat.  More 
wheat  meant  more  business,  so  Chicago 
said 

"Glad  to  see  you.  You  're  the  right 
man  and  you  're  in  the  right  place.  Come 
in  and  get  busy."  William  B.  Ogden,  the 
first  Mayor  of  Chicago,  listened  to  his  story 
for  two  minutes,  then  asked  him  how  much 
he  wanted  for  a  half  interest.  McCormick 
had   little   money   and   no   prestige.     Ogden 


The  Story  of  McCormick  29 

had  a  surplus  of  both.  So  a  partnership 
was  arranged,  and  the  new  firm  plunged 
toward  prosperity  by  seHing  $50,000  worth 
of  reapers   for  the   next   harvest. 

At  last  there  had  come  a  break  in  the 
clouds,  and  McCormick  found  his  path 
flooded  with  sunshine.  He  was  no  longer 
a  wanderer  in  the  night.  He  was  the  Reaper 
King —  the  founder  of  a  new  dynasty.  As 
soon  as  possible  he  bought  out  Ogden,  and 
thenceforth  established  a  one-man  business. 
By  1 85 1  he  was  making  a  thousand  reapers 
a  year,  and  owned  one-tenth  of  the  million 
dollars  he  had  dreamed  of  in  the  Virginian 
wilderness. 

At  this  point  his  life  changes.  His  pioneer 
troubles  are  over.  There  are  no  more 
thousand-mile  rides  on  horseback  —  no  more 
conflicts  with  jeering  crowds  —  no  more 
smashing  of  reapers  by  farm  labourers. 
The  repeal  of  the  Corn  Laws  in  England 
had  opened  up  a  new  market  for  our  wheat, 
and  the  discovery  of  gold  in  California  was 
booming  the  reaper  business  by  making 
money  plentiful  and  labour  scarce. 

Suddenly,  McCormick  looked  up  from 
his  work  in  the  factory,  and  saw  that  he  was 


30  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

not  only  rich,  but  famous.  One  of  his 
reapers  had  taken  the  Grand  Prize  at  a 
World's  Fair  in  England.  Even  the  London 
Times,  which  had  first  ridiculed  his  reaper 
as  "a  cross  between  an  Astley  chariot,  a 
wheelbarrow  and  a  flying  machine,"  was 
obliged  to  admit,  several  days  later,  that 
"the  McCormick  reaper  is  worth  the  whole 
cost  of  the  Exposition." 

Seventeen  years  later,  on  the  imperial 
farm,  near  Paris,  Napoleon  III.  descended 
from  his  carriage  and  fastened  the  Cross  of 
the  Legion  of  Honour  upon  McCormick's 
coat.  There  was  a  picture  that  some  Ameri- 
can-souled  artist,  when  we  have  one,  will 
delight  to  put  on  canvas.  How  splendid 
was  the  contrast,  and  how  significant  of 
the  New  Age  of  Democracy,  between  the 
suave  and  feeble  Emperor,  enjoying  the 
sunset  rays  of  his  inherited  glory,  and  the 
strong-faced,  rough-handed  Virginian  farmer, 
who  had  built  up  a  new  empire  of  commerce 
that  will  last  as  long  as  the  human  race 
eats  bread! 

From  first  to  last,  the  stout-hearted  old 
Reaper  King  received  no  favours  from 
Congress    or    the    Patent    Office.     He    built 


The  Story  of  McCormick  3 1 

up  his  stupendous  business  without  a  land 
grant  or  a  protective  tariff.  By  the  time 
that  his  Chicago  factory  was  ten  years  old, 
he  had  sold  23,000  reapers,  and  cleared  a 
profit  of  nearly  $1,300,00.  The  dream  of 
his  youth  had  been  realised,  and  more. 
All  told,  in  1859,  there  were  50,000  reapers 
in  the  United  States,  doing  the  work  of 
350,000  men,  saving  $4,000,000  in  wages, 
and  cramming  the  barns  with  50,000,000 
bushels  of  grain. 

So,  on  his  fiftieth  birthday,  the  battle- 
scarred  McCormick  found  himself  a  million- 
aire. He  was  also  married,  having  fallen 
in  love  with  Miss  Nettie  Fowler,  of  New 
York,  a  young  lady  of  unusual  beauty  and 
ability.  No  history  of  the  reaper  can  be 
complete  without  a  reference  to  this  remark- 
able woman,  who  has  been  for  fifty  years, 
and  is  to-day,  one  of  the  active  factors  in 
our  industrial  development.  No  important 
step  has  ever  been  taken  either  by  her 
husband  or  her  three  sons,  until  it  has 
received  her  approval.  And  Mrs.  McCor- 
mick has  been  much  more  than  a  mere 
adviser.  Her  exact  memory  and  keen  grasp 
of   the    comple.K    details    of    her    husband's 


32  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

business  made  her  practically  an  unofficial 
manager.  She  suggested  economies  at  the 
factory,  stopped  the  custom  of  closing  the 
plant  in  midsummer,  studied  the  abilities 
of  the  workmen,  and  on  several  occasions 
superintended    the    field-trials    in    Europe. 

Chicago  may  not  know  it,  but  it  is  true, 
that  its  immense  McCormick  factory  owes 
its  existence  to  Mrs.  McCormick.  After 
the  Big  Fire  of  1871,  when  his  ^2,000,000 
plant  was  in  ruins,  McCormick  concluded 
to  retire.  He  still  had  a  fortune  of  three  or 
four  millions  and  he  was  sixty-two  years  of 
age.  His  managers  advised  him  not  to 
rebuild,  because  of  the  excessive  cost  of  new 
machinery. 

As  soon  as  the  fiery  cyclone  had  passed, 
he  and  his  wife  drove  to  the  wrecked  factory. 
Several  hundred  of  the  workmen  gathered 
about  the  carriage,  and  the  chief  engineer, 
acting  as  spokesman,  said:  "Well,  Mr. 
McCormick,  shall  we  start  the  small  engine 
and  make  repairs,  or  shall  we  start  the  big 
engine  and  make  machines  r' 

Mr.  McCormick  turned  to  his  wife  and 
said,  "Which  shall  it  be  ?"  It  was  a  breath- 
less moment  for  the  workmen. 


The  Story  of  McCormick  33 

"Build  again  at  once,"  said  Mrs.  Mc- 
Cormick. "  I  do  not  want  our  boy  to  grow 
up  in  idleness;  I  want  him  to  work,  as  a 
useful  citizen,  and  a  true  American." 

"Start  The  Big  Engine,"  said  McCor- 
mick. The  men  threw  their  hats  in  the  air 
and  cheered.  They  sprang  at  the  smoking 
debris,  and  began  to  rebuild  before  the 
cinders  were  cold. 

Such  was  the  second  birth  of  the  vast 
factory  which,  in  its  sixty  years,  has  created 
fully  5,000,000  harvesters,  and  which  is  now 
so  magically  automatic  that,  with  6,000 
workmen,  it  can  make  one-third  of  all  the 
grain-gathering   machinery   of  the   world. 

Practically  nothing  has  been  written  about 
McCormick  from  the  human  nature  side. 
He  was  one  of  those  Cromwellian  men  who 
can  only  be  appreciated  at  a  distance.  Ke 
was  too  absorbed  in  his  work  to  be  congenial 
and  too  aggressive  to  be  popular.  He 
shouldered  his  way  roughly  against  the 
slow-moving  crowd;  and  the  people  whom  he 
thrust  out  of  his  way  naturally  did  not 
consider   the   importance   of  his   life-task. 

Most  of  the  really  great  men  of  his  day 
were  his  friends  —  Horace  Greeley,  for  in- 


34  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

stance,  and  Peter  Cooper,  Junius  Morgan, 
Abram  S.  Hewitt,  Cyrus  W.  Field,  and 
Ferdinand  De  Lesseps.  But  among  the 
men  of  his  own  trade  he  stood  hostile  and 
alone. 

"McCormick  wants  to  keep  the  whole 
reaper  business  to  himself.  He  will  not 
live  and  let  live,"  said  his  competitors.  And 
they  had  reason  to  say  so.  He  did  want  to 
dominate.  He  wanted  to  make  all  the 
harvesting  machines  that  were  made  —  not 
one  less.  He  was  not  at  all  a  modern 
"community-of-interest"  financier.  He  was 
a  man  of  an  outgrown  school  —  a  consistent 
individualist,  not  only  in  business,  but  in 
politics  and  religion  as  well.  There  was  no 
compartment  in  his  brain  for  mergers  and 
combines  — ^for  theories  of  government  owner- 
ship —  for  Higher  Criticism  and  the  new 
theology.  He  was  a  Benjamin  Franklin 
commercialist,  a  Thomas  Jefferson  Demo- 
crat, and  a  John  Knox  Presbyterian. 

He  had  worked  harder  to  establish  the 
reaper  business  than  any  other  man.  He 
was  making  reapers  when  William  Deering 
was  five  years  old,  and  before  Ralph  Emer- 
son  and    "Bill"   Whiteley   were   born.     He 


The  Story  of  McCormick  35 

had  graduated  into  success  through  a  fifteen- 
year  course  in  failure.  The  world  into 
which  he  was  born  was  as  hostile  to  him  as 
the  Kentucky  wilderness  was  to  Daniel 
Boone  or  the  Atlantic  Ocean  to  Columbus. 
He  was  hard-fibred,  because  he  had  to  be. 
He  was  the  thin  end  of  the  wedge  that  split 
into  fragments  the  agricultural  obstacle  to 
social  progress. 

One  careless  writer  of  biographies  has 
said  that  McCormick  began  at  the  foot  of  the 
ladder.  This  is  not  correct.  When  he 
began,  there  was  no  ladder.  He  had  to 
build  it  as   he  clunhed. 

The  first  man  who  gave  battle  to  Mc- 
Cormick was  an  erratic  genius  named  Obed 
Hussey,  who,  as  we  have  seen,  secured  a 
reaper  patent  in  1833.  No  two  men  were 
ever  more  unlike  than  Hussey  and  Mc- 
Cormick. Hussey  was  born  in  Nantucket; 
and  he  had  roamed  the  frozen  North  as  a 
whaling  seaman.  He  was  inventive,  poetic, 
and  as  whimsical  as  the  weather.  His 
delimit  was  in  working;  out  some  mechan- 
ical  problem.  His  first  invention  was  a 
machine  to  make  pins.  Soon  afterward, 
while    he    was    living    in    Cincinnati,    con- 


36  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

structing    a    machine   to   mould    candles,  a 
friend  said  to  him: 

"  Hussey,  why  don't  you  invent  a  machine 
to    reap    grain  ?" 

"Are  there  no  such  machines?"  he  asked 
in  surprise. 

"No,"  said  his  friend,  "and  whoever  can 
invent  one  will  make  a  fortune." 

Hussey  forsook  his  candle  machine,  set  to 
work  upon  a  reaper,  and  within  a  year  had 
one  in  the  fields.  Then  came  a  twenty-five- 
year  war  with  McCormick,  which  was 
waged  furiously  in  the  Patent  Office,  the 
courts,  and  a  hundred  wheat-fields.  Hussey 
won  the  opening  battle  by  arriving  first  at 
the  Patent  Office,  although  his  machine,  as 
claimed  by  McCormick,  was  two  years 
younger.  By  1841  Hussey  had  sold  reapers 
in  five  states,  and  ten  years  later  he  shared 
the  honours  with  McCormick  at  the  London 
World's  Fair. 

Both  machines  were  very  crude  and 
unsatisfactory.  Hussey's  had  a  better  cut- 
ting apparatus  and  McCormick's  was  more 
complete.  In  the  long  run,  each  adopted 
the  devices  of  the  other,  and  a  better  reaper 
was  evolved.     Before  many  years,  it  became 


The  Story  of  McCormick  3/ 

apparent  that  Hussey  was  outclassed.  By 
1858  he  was  left  so  far  behind  that  he  lost 
his  interest  in  reapers  and  invented  a  steam- 
plough. 

His  first  machine  was  "really  a  mower," 
says  Merritt  Finley  Miller,  one  of  the  two 
professors  who  have  written  on  harvesting 
machinery.  It  lacked  the  master-wheel,  the 
reel  and  the  divider,  without  which  the  grain 
cannot  be  rightly  handled.  When  Hussey 
gave  up  the  contest,  his  invention  was  bought 
for  ;^200,ooo  by  William  F.  Ketchum  and 
others,  who  adapted  it  into  a  mowing- 
machine. 

"Hussey  was  a  very  peculiar  man," 
said  Ralph  Emerson.  "His  machine  was 
fairly  good,  but  it  was  a  failure  in  the  market, 
because  he  would  not  put  on  a  reel.  He 
refused  to  do  this,  saying  he  did  not  invent 
a  reel,  and  it  would  be  a  falsehood  if  he  put 
one  on.  He  said  that  it  was  contrary  to  his 
principles  to  sell  anything  that  he  had  not 
invented. 

"On  one  occasion  I  went  to  buy  a  shop 
licence  from  him.  'Have  you  a  thousand 
dollars  in  your  pocket?'  he  asked.  'No,' 
said    I.     'Can   you   get   me   three   thousand 


38  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

dollars  by  daylight  to-morrow  morning  ?' 
*No,'  I  answered,  'but  I  can  get  it  by  noon. 
'Well,'  said  Hussey,  'I  want  to  be  very 
reasonable  with  you.  If  you  '11  pay  me 
one  thousand  dollars  before  you  leave  the 
house,  or  twenty-five  hundred  dollars  before 
daybreak  to-morrow,  I  '11  sell  you  a  licence. 
Otherwise,  it  will  cost  you  twelve  thousand 
dollars.* 

"Several  days  later  I  paid  him  twelve 
thousand  dollars,  and  as  he  handed  me  the 
licence,  he  said  —  'Now,  don't  say  that  I 
neverofFeredyou  thisfor  a  thousand  dollars.'" 

Hussey's  adventurous  life  was  snapped 
short  by  a  tragic  death.  While  he  was  on  a 
train  at  Baltimore,  a  little  girl  was  crying 
for  a  drink  of  water.  The  kind-hearted 
old  sailor-mechanic  got  off  the  train,  brought 
her  a  glass  of  water,  and  on  his  way  to  return 
the  glass,  he  slipped  and  fell  between  the 
moving  wheels. 

Of  all  the  men  who  fought  McCormick  in 
the  earlier  days,  I  found  only  tv/o  now 
alive  —  Ralph  Emerson,  of  Rockford,  and 
William  N.  Whiteley,  of  Springfield,  Ohio. 
Both  of  these  men  to-day  generously  give 
the  old  warrior  his  due. 


The  Story  of  McCormick  39 

"  McCormick  was  the  first  man  to  make 
the  reaper  a  success  in  the  field,"  said 
Whiteley,  the  battle-worn  giant  of  Ohio, 
where  I  found  him  still  at  work.  "  Mc- 
Cormick was  a  fighter  —  a  bulldog,  we 
called  him;  but  those  were  rough  days. 
The  man  who  could  n't  fight  was  wiped  out." 

Ralph  Emerson,  now  one  of  the  most 
venerable  figures  in  Illinois,  rose  from  a 
sick-bed  against  his  doctor's  orders,  so  that 
he  might  be  magnanimous  to  his  former 
antagonist. 

"  McCormick's  first  reapers  were  a  failure," 
said  he,  speaking  slowly  and  with  great 
difficulty;  "and  he  owed  his  preeminence 
mainly  to  his  great  business  ability.  His 
enemies  have  said  that  he  was  not  an  inven- 
tor, but  I  say  that  he  was  an  inventor  of 
eminence." 

So,  as  the  gray  haze  of  years  enables  us 
to  trace  the  larger  outlines  of  his  work,  we 
can  see  that  McCormick  was  especially 
fitted  for  a  task  which,  up  to  his  day,  had 
never  been  done,  and  which  will  never  need 
to  be  repeated  during  the  lifetime  of  our 
earth.  He  was  absolutely  mastered  by  one 
idea,  as  wholly  as  Copernicus  or  Columbus. 


40  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

His  business  was  his  life.  It  was  not  acci- 
dental, as  with  Rockefeller,  nor  incidental, 
as  with  Carnegie.  On  one  occasion  when  a 
friend  was  joking  him  about  his  poor  judg- 
ment in  outside  affairs,  he  whirled  around 
in  his  chair  and  said  emphatically:  "I 
have  one  purpose  in  life,  and  only  one  — 
the  success  and  widespread  use  of  my 
machines.  All  other  matters  are  to  me  too 
insignificant    to    be    considered." 

He  made  money  —  ten  millions  or  more. 
But  a  hundred  millions  would  not  have 
bribed  him  to  forsake  his  reaper.  It  was 
as  much  a  part  of  him  as  his  right  hand. 
In  several  of  his  business  letters  he  writes 
as  though  he  had  been  a  Hebrew  prophet, 
charged  with  a  world-message  of  salvation. 

"  But  for  the  fact  that  Providence  has 
seemed  to  assist  me  in  all  our  business," 
he  writes  on  one  critical  occasion,  "it  has 
at  times  seemed  that  I  would  almost  sink 
under  the  weight  of  responsibility  hanging 
upon  me.    I  believe  the  Lord  will  help  us  out." 

Not  that  he  left  any  detail  to  Providence 
to  which  he  could  personally  attend.  He 
was  a  Puritan  of  the  "trust-in-God-and-keep- 
your-powder-dry"   species.     A   little   farther 


The  Story  of  McCormick  4I 

down,  in  this  same  letter,  he  writes  — 
"Meet  Hussey  in  Maryland  and  put  him 
down." 

The  fountain-springs  of  his  life  were 
wholly  within.  He  acted  from  a  few  basic, 
unchangeable  convictions.  If  public  opinion 
was  with  him,  he  was  gratified;  if  it  was 
against  him  he  thought  no  more  of  it  than 
of  the  rustling  of  the  trees  when  the  wind  blew. 

"When  anyone  opposed  his  plans  and 
showed  that  they  were  impossible,"  said  one 
of  his  superintendents,  "  I  noticed  that  he 
never  argued;  he  just  went  on  working." 

His  brain  had  certain  subjects  distinctly 
mapped  out.  What  he  knew  —  he  knew. 
He  had  no  hazy  imaginings.  He  lived  in  a 
black  and  white  world  and  abhorred  all 
half-tints.  He  was  right  —  always  right, 
and  the  men  who  opposed  him  were  Philis- 
tines and  false  prophets,  who  deserved  to  be 
consumed   by   sudden    fire   from    Heaven. 

It  was  this  inward  spiritual  force  that 
made  him  irresistible.  Small  men  shrivelled 
up  when  he  spoke  to  them. 

"The  exhibition  of  his  powerful  will  was 
at  times  actually  terrible,"  said  one  of  his 
attorneys.     "If  any  other  man  on  this  earth 


42  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

ever  had  such  a  will,  certainly  I  have  not 
heard   of  it." 

Small  and  easy  undertakings  had  no 
interest  for  him  whatever.  It  was  the 
impossibility  that  enraged  and  inspired  him. 
At  the  sight  of  an  obstacle  in  his  path,  he 
rushed  forward  like  a  charge  of  cavalry. 
When  the  Civil  War  was  at  its  height,  he 
and  Horace  Greeley,  who  was  very  similar 
to  him  in  this  respect,  actually  believed  that 
they  could  stop  it.  They  had  several  long 
conferences  in  the  Fifth  Avenue  Hotel,  New 
York,  and  McCormick  went  so  far  in  1864 
as  to  prepare  a  statement  of  principles  which 
he  fully  believed  would  restore  peace  and 
harmony  between  the  North  and  the  South. 

Such  was  this  massive,  unbendable  Ameri- 
can. As  we  shall  see,  he  was  far  from  being 
the  only  strong,  picturesque  figure  in  the 
industry.  But  it  would  make  many  a  book 
to  tell  in  detail  the  effect  of  his  life  work 
upon  the  progress  of  the  United  States.  It 
was  a  New  World,  truly,  that  had  been 
created,  alike  for  the  people  of  the  farms 
and  of  the  cities,  in  the  year  that  the  vic- 
torious old  Reaper  King  was  carried  to  his 
grave,  with  a  sheaf  of  wheat  on  his  breast. 


The  Story  of  McCormick  43 

What  if  there  had  been  no  reapers,  and  no 
hunger-insurance,  and  no  cheap  bread!  What 
sort  of  an  American  nation  would  we  have, 
if  we  were  still  using  such  food-implements 
as  the  sickle  and  the  flail  ? 

Could  we  have  swung  through  four  years 
of  Civil  War,  as  we  did,  without  famine  or 
national  insolvency  ? 

Could  the  West  have  risen  toward  its 
present  greatness  if  its  billion  acres  had  to  be 
harvested  by  hand  ? 

Could  the  railways  alone,  which  produce 
nothing,  have  given  us  more  food  for  less 
work  —  the  first  necessity  of  a  civilised 
democracy  ? 

Would  our  manufacturers  be  creating 
new  wealth  at  the  rate  of  sixteen  billions  a 
year,  if  the  reaper  had  not  enriched  the 
farmers  and  sent  half  the  farm-hands  into 
the  factories  ? 

And  our  towering  cities  — two  of  them 
more  populous  than  the  thirteen  colonies 
were,  how  large  would  they  be  and  how 
prosperous  if  bread  were  twenty  cents  a 
pound  ? 

As  Seward  once  said,  it  was  the  reaper 
that   "pushed   the   American   frontier  west- 


44  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

ward  at  the  rate  of  thirty  miles  a  year." 
Most  of  the  western  railways  were  built 
to  the  wheat;  and  it  was  wheat  money  that 
paid  for  them.  The  reaper  clicked  ahead  of 
the  railroad,  and  civilisation  followed  the 
wheat,  from  Chicago  to  Puget  Sound,  just 
as  the  self-binder  is  leading  the  railroad 
to-day  —  three  hundred  miles  in  front  in 
Western  Canada,  and  eight  hundred  miles 
in  Siberia.  Even  so  unyielding  a  partisan 
of  the  railroads  as  Marvin  Hughitt  admitted 
to  me  that  "the  reaper  has  not  yet  received 
proper  recognition  for  its  development  of 
the  West." 

During  the  Civil  War  the  reaper  was  doing 
the  work  of  a  million  men  in  the  grain-fields 
of  the  North.  It  enabled  a  widow,  with 
five  sons,  to  send  them  all  to  the  front,  and 
yet  gather  every  sheaf  into  the  barn.  It 
kept  the  wolf  from  the  door,  and  more  —  it 
paid  our  European  debts  in  wheat.  It 
wiped  out  all  necessity  for  Negro  labour 
in  the  wheat  States,  just  as  a  cotton-picker 
will,  some  day,  in  the  South. 

*'The  reaper  is  to  the  North  what  the 
slave  is  to  the  South,"  said  Edwin  M. 
Stanton    in    1861.     "It    releases   our   young 


The  Story  of  McCormick  45 

men  to  do  battle  for  the  Union,  and  at  the 
same  time  keeps  up  the  supply  of  the  nation's 
bread." 

Lincoln  called  out  every  third  man,  yet 
the  crops  increased.  Europeans  could  not 
believe  it.  They  heard  in  1861  that  we 
were  sending  three  times  as  much  wheat  to 
England  as  we  had  ever  done  before.  They 
shook  their  heads  and  said  —  "Another 
American  story!"  when  they  were  told  that 
we  were  supporting  two  vast  armies  and  yet 
selling  other  nations  enough  grain  to  feed 
thirty-five  million  people.  Naturally,  no 
country  that  clung  to  the  sickle  and  flail 
could  be  convinced  of  such  a  preposterous 
miracle. 

After  the  war,  the  mighty  river  of  wheat 
that  flowed  from  the  West  became  so  wide 
and  so  deep  that  it  poured  a  yellow  stream 
into  every  American  home.  It  began  to 
turn  the  wheels  of  fourteen  thousand  flour- 
mills.  Rich  cities  sprang  up,  like  Aladdin 
palaces,  beside  its  banks  —  Chicago,  St. 
Louis,  Cincinnati,  Milwaukee,  Minneapolis, 
Kansas  City,  St.  Paul,  Omaha,  Des  Moines. 
All  of  these,  and  a  hundred  lesser  ones,  were 
nourished     into     prosperity    by    the     rising 


46  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

current  of  reaper-wheat,  as  it  moved  from  the 
Mississippi  to  the  sea. 

By  1876  we  had  become  the  champion 
food-producers  of  the  world.  A  Kansas 
farmer  was  raising  six  bushels  of  wheat 
with  as  little  labour  as  an  Italian  spent  to 
produce  one.  And  there  was  one  doughty 
Scot  —  Dalrymple  of  Dakota,  who  was  guil- 
lotining more  wheat  with  four  hundred 
labourers  and  three  hundred  harvesters, 
than  five  thousand  peasants  could  garner 
by  hand. 

Inevitably,  the  American  Farmer  became 
a  financier.  In  1876  he  earned  twenty-four 
per  cent.  He  had  twenty-seven  hundred 
millions  to  spend.  By  1880  he  had  begun 
to  buy  so  much  store  goods  that  the  United 
States  was  able  to  write  a  Declaration  of 
Industrial  Independence.  Steadily  he  has 
grown  richer  and  wiser,  until  now  he  is  the 
owner  of  a  billion-acre  farm,  v/orth  thirty 
dollars  an  acre,  operated  with  farm  machinery 
that  cost  him  ^900,000,000  and  producing, 
in  a  single  year,  seven  thousand  times  the 
value   of  a   millionaire. 

Such,  in  one  country,  is  the  amazing 
result  which  the  Reaper  has  helped  to  create. 


The  Story  of  McCormick  \^ 

And  this  is  not  all.  It  is  now  more  necessary 
to  the  human  race  than  the  railway.  It  is 
fighting  back  famine  in  fifty  countries.  Its 
click  has  become  the  music  of  an  International 
Anthem.  The  nations  are  feeding  each 
other,  in  spite  of  their  tariffs  and  armies. 
The  whole  world  takes  dinner  at  the  one 
long  table;  and  the  fear  of  hunger  is  dying 
out  of  the  hearts  of  men;  and  the  prayer  of 
the  Christian  centuries  is  answered — "Give 
us  this  day  our  daily  bread." 


CHAPTER  II 
The  Story  of  Deering 

FIFTY  years  ago  two  young  farmers 
named  Marsh  were  cutting  grain  near 
DeKalb,  Illinois.  They  were  too  intelli- 
gent —  too  American  —  to  be  fond  of  work 
for  work's  sake.  And  of  all  their  drudgery, 
the  everlasting  stooping  over  bundles  to  bind 
them  into  sheaves  galled  them  most.  Such 
back-breaking  toil,  they  thought,  might  be 
well  enough  for  kangaroos,  but  it  certainly 
was  not  suitable  for  an  erect  biped,  like  man. 

"  If  I  did  n't  have  to  walk  from  bundle  to 
bundle,  and  hump  myself  like  a  horseshoe, 
I  could  do  twice  as  much  work,"  said  one  of 
the  brothers. 

"Well,"  said  the  other,  *'why  can't  we  fix 
a  platform  on  the  reaper,  and  have  the  grain 
carried  up  to  us  ?" 

It  was  a  brilliant  idea  and  a  new  one. 
Neither  of  the  young  fellows  had  ever  seen  a 
reaper   factory;    but   they   were   handy   and 


The  Story  of  Deering  49 

self-reliant.  By  the  next  autumn  they  were  in 
the  field  with  their  new  machine,  and  as 
they  had  expected,  they  bound  the  grain 
twice  as  quickly  as  they  had  the  year  before. 

So  was  born  the  famous  Marsh  harvester, 
which  proved  to  be  the  half-way  mark  in 
the  evolution  of  the  grain-reaping  machine. 
It  was  the  child  of  the  reaper  and  the  parent 
of  the  self-binder.  It  cut  in  two  the  cost  of 
binding  grain.  But  it  did  more  than  this  — 
it  gave  the  farmer  his  first  chance  to  stand 
erect,  and  forced  him  to  be  quick,  for  the 
two  men  who  stood  on  the  harvester  were 
compelled  to  bind  the  grain  as  fast  as  it  was 
cut.  Thus  it  introduced  the  factory  system, 
one  might  say,  into  the  harvest-field.  For 
the  first  time  the  Big  Minute  made  its  appear- 
ance on  the  farm. 

The  Marsh  boys,  never  dreaming  that 
they  had  helped  to  change  the  destinies  of 
nations,  took  out  a  flimsy  patent  on  their 
invention,  and  went  on  with  their  farm  work. 
Two  summers  later,  as  they  were  at  work 
with  it,  their  home-made  harvester  broke 
down.  A  farmer  from  Piano,  near  DeKalb, 
named  Lewis  Steward,  was  riding  by.  He 
stopped,  and,  being  a  man  of  unusual  abili- 


50  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

ties  and  discernment,  he  at  once  saw  the 
value  of  the  Marsh  machine,  even  in  its 
disabled  state. 

"  Boys,  you  're  on  the  right  track,"  he  said. 
"If  you  can  run  your  machine  ten  rods,  it 
can  be  made  to  run  ten  miles.  It  is  superior 
to  anything  now  in  use." 

Thus  cheered,  the  Marsh  brothers  went 
to  Piano,  arranged  a  partnership  with  a 
clever  mechanic  named  John  F.  Hollister, 
and  began  to  make  harvesters  for  sale.  To 
their  surprise  the  new  machine  was  not 
welcomed.  It  was  received  with  an  almost 
unanimous  roar  of  disapproval.  It  was  a 
"man-killer,"  said  the  farmers.  Now,  the 
Marsh  brothers  were  quick,  nervous  men, 
and  they  had  built  a  machine  to  suit  them- 
selves. But  it  was  undeniably  too  fast  and 
nerve-racking  for  most  farmers.  The  labour- 
ers   refused    to   work   with    it. 

The  Marshes  overcame  the  obstacle  in  a 
very  ingenious  way.  They  put  girls  on 
their  harvesters,  instead  of  men.  Not  ordi- 
nary girls,  to  be  sure,  but  vigorous  German 
maidens,  who  were  swift  and  skilful  binders. 
Also,  they  had  well-trained  men,  disguised 
as  hoboes,  who  mingled  in  the  crowd  around 


WILLIAM    DEERINC. 


The  Story  of  Deering  51 

the  harvester  at  times  of  demonstration, 
and  volunteered  to  get  aboard  of  it.  To 
see  a  girl  or  a  "Weary  Willie"  binding  grain 
on  the  new  machine  shamed  the  labourers 
into  a  surrender,  and  in  1864  two  dozen  of  the 
Marsh  harvesters  were  sold. 

In  this  year  one  of  the  Marshes  performed 
a  feat  that  seemed  more  appropriate  for  a 
circus  than  for  a  grain-field.  Riding  alone 
on  a  harvester,  he  bound  a  whole  acre  of 
wheat  in  fifty-five  minutes.  Little  was  heard 
of  this  amazing  achievement  at  the  time, 
as  the  national  mind  was  distraught  over  the 
death  grapple  of  Grant  and  Lee  in  Virginia. 

But  there  was  one  quick-eyed  man  in 
Chicago  named  Gammon  w^ho  heard  of  the 
event,  and  acted  upon  it  so  promptly  that  the 
goddess  of  prosperity  picked  him  out  as  one 
of  her  favourites.  Several  years  before, 
Gammon  had  been  a  Methodist  preacher  in 
Maine.  A  weak  throat  had  brought  his 
sermons  to  an  end,  and  he  became  a  reaper 
salesman  in  Chicago.  He  was  shrewd  and 
honest,  and  in  1864  his  profits  were  very 
nearly  forty  thousand  dollars. 

When  he  heard  that  W.  W.  Marsh  had 
bound  an  acre  of  grain  in  fifty-five  minutes. 


52  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

on  a  new-fangled  reaper,  he  caught  the  next 
train  for  DeKalb,  and  bought  a  Hcence  to 
manufacture  Marsh  harvesters.  He  took 
in  a  partner  —  J.  D.  Easter  —  and  the  busi- 
ness inched  ahead  slowly,  until  in  1870  the 
sales  rose  to  a  thousand.  Easter  and  Gam- 
mon were  driving  their  small  factory  ahead 
at  full  speed.  If  they  only  could  secure 
enough  capital,  they  would  surprise  the 
world. 

One  evening,  while  Gammon  was  worrying 
over  this  lack,  he  heard  a  gentle  knock  at  the 
door.  He  opened  it  to  one  of  his  old  acquaint- 
ances from   Maine. 

*'  Mr.  Gammon,"  said  the  visitor,  "  I  have 
about  forty  thousand  dollars  of  spare  money 
that  I  would  like  to  invest  in  Chicago  real 
estate,  and  I  want  your  advice  as  to  the  best 
place  to  buy." 

"What!"  said  Gammon,  springing  to  his 
feet  in  delight.  *'Have  you  money  to  invest  ? 
Give  it  to  me  and  I  '11  pay  you  ten  per  cent, 
or  make  you  a  partner  in  the  best  business  in 
Illinois." 

The  visitor,  whose  name  was  William 
Deering,  knew  nothing  whatever  about 
reapers  nor  wheat-fields.     He  had  gained  a 


rb-to  l.y  Eaumsrar-lMr.  S].ringfieM,  0. 

WILLIAM  N.  WHITELEY 


C.  W.  MARSH 


JOHN   F.  APPLEBY 


E.   H.   GAMMON 


The  Story  of  Deering  53 

fair-sized  fortune  in  the  wholesale  dry-goods 
business.  But  he  was  a  Methodist  and  had 
confidence  in  the  ex-reverend  E.  H.  Gam- 
mon; so  he  passed  his  $40,000  across  the 
table  and  the  next  day  went  home  to  Maine. 

Two  years  later  Deering  came  down  to  see 
how  Gammon  and  the  $40,000  were  faring. 
The  books  showed  a  profit  of  $80,000.  So 
Deering  requested  that  he  be  made  a  partner. 
A  year  afterward  Gammon  fell  sick  and 
begged  Deering  to  come  to  Illinois  and 
manage  the  business.  Deering  consented 
to  be  manager  for  one  year  only;  but  Gam- 
mon's sickness  continued. 

"So,"  said  William  Deering,  who  told  me 
this  story,_^"  in  that  way  I  got  into  the  harvester 
business  and  had  to  stay  in.  But  I  did  not 
even  know,  at  that  time,  the  appearance  of 
our  own  machine." 

Deering's  competitors  at  first  called  him  a 
greenhorn.  But  they  forgot  that  he  was  the 
only  one  among  them  who  had  been  trained 
in  the  art  of  business.  He  was  already  a 
veteran  —  a  prize  winner  —  in  the  game  of 
finance.  For  thirty  years,  ever  since  he  began 
to  earn  $18  a  month  in  his  father's  woolen 
mills,  he  had  been  a  man  of  affairs.     He  had, 


54  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

in  fact,  established  the  wholesale  dry-goods 
house  of  Deering,  Milliken  &  Co.,  which 
still  stands  as  one  of  the  largest  of  its  kind. 
This  training  was  all  the  more  valuable  an 
asset  because  of  the  conditions  that  pre- 
vailed when  Deering  entered  the  harvester 
trade.  For  he  arrived  in  that  worst  of  all 
years  in  the  last  century  —  1873-  The  Jay 
Cooke  panic  was  at  its  height.  The  proudest 
corporations  were  falling  like  grass  before  a 
mower.  It  was  a  year  of  dread  and  paralysis. 
But  Deering  faced  these  disadvantages  with 
ability,  with  sheer,  dogged  persistence,  and 
with  business  training.  In  seven  years  he  had 
become  one  of  the  greatest  of  the  harvester 
kings,  and  v/as  leading  them  all  up  to  a 
higher  level. 

We  shall  understand  more  clearly  what 
this  means  if  we  consider  the  state  of  the 
trade  at  the  time  of  his  entrance.  A  man  of 
peaceable  and  kindly  inclinations,  Deering 
was  dragged  into  a  business  that  was  as 
turbulent  as  a  bull-fight.  For  as  the  reaper 
had  evolved,  it  had  become  a  bone  of  conten- 
tion, and  it  remained  so  from  the  first  patent 
to  the  last.  The  opening  battle  was  fought 
by  McCormick  and  Husscy,  each  claiming  to 


The  Story  of  Deering  55 

have  been  tlie  Christopher  Columbus  of  the 
business.  After  the  gold-rush  of  1849  new 
types  of  reapers  sprang  up  on  all  sides.  The 
crude  machines  that  merely  cut  the  grain 
were  driven  out  by  otiicrs  that  automatically 
raked  the  cut  grain  into  bundles.  These 
were  soon  followed  by  a  combined  reaper  and 
mower,  which  held  the  field  until  the  Marsh 
harvester  was  invented,  as  we  have  seen, 
at  the  close  of  the  Civil  War. 

Among  these  different  types  of  reapers, 
and  the  numerous  variations  of  each  type, 
the  bitterest  rivalries  prevailed.  There  was 
no  pool,  no  "gentlemen's  agreement,"  no 
"community  of  interest."  Indeed,  the 
"harvester  business"  was  not  business.  It 
was  a  riotous  game  of  "  Farmer,  farmer,  who 
gets  the  farmer  .?"  The  excited  players  cared 
less  for  the  profits  than  for  the  victories.  As 
fast  as  they  made  money,  they  threw  it  back 
into  the  game.  Mechanics  became  m.illion- 
aires,  and  millionaires  became  mechanics. 
The  whole  trade  was  tense  with  risk  and 
rivalry  and  excitement,  as  though  it  were  a 
search  for  gold  along  the  high  plateaus 
of  the  Rand.  And  this  in  spite  of  the  fact 
that,    with    the    exception    of    McCormick, 


56  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

Osborne,  and  Whiteley,  the  men  who  came 
to  be  known  as  reaper  kings  were  not  naturally 
fighters.  No  business  men  were  ever  gentler 
than  Deering,  Glessner,  Warder,  Adriance, 
and  Huntley.  But  the  making  of  reapers 
was  a  new  trade.  It  was  like  a  vast,  un- 
fenced  prairie,  where  every  settler  owned  as 
much    ground    as    he    could    defend. 

Each  step  ahead  meant  a  struggle  for 
patents.  Whoever  built  a  reaper  had  to 
defend  himself  in  the  courts  as  well  as  approve 
himself  in  the  harvest-fields.  Cyrus  H. 
McCormick,  especially,  as  William  Deering 
soon  learned,  wielded  the  Big  Stick  against 
every  man  who  dared  to  make  reapers.  He 
was  the  old  veteran  of  the  trade,  and  he  gave 
battle  to  his  competitors  as  though  they  were 
a  horde  of  trespassers.  He  was  their  com- 
mon enemy,  and  the  reaper  money  that  was 
squandered  on  lawsuits  brought  a  golden  era 
of  prosperity  to  the  lawyers. 

Some  of  these  patent  wars  shook  the 
country  with  the  crash  of  hostile  forces.  The 
tide  of  battle  rolled  up  to  the  Supreme  Court 
and  even  into  the  halls  of  Congress.  Once, 
in  1855,  when  McCormick  charged  full  tilt 
upon    John    H.    Manny,    who    was    making 


The   Story  of  Deering  57 

reapers  at  Rockford,  Illinois,  a  three-year 
struggle  began  that  was  the  most  noted  legal 
duel  of  the  day. 

McCormick,  to  make  sure  of  his  victory, 
went  into  the  fight  with  a  battery  of  lawyers 
whom  he  thought  invincible  —  William  H. 
Seward,  E.  M.  Dickerson,  and  Senator 
Reverdy  Johnson.  Manny  made  a  giant 
effort  at  self-defence  by  hiring  Abraham 
Lincoln,  Edwin  M.  Stanton,  Stephen  A. 
Douglas,  Peter  H.  Watson,  George  Harding, 
and  Congressman  H.  Winter  Davis. 

From  first  to  last  it  was  a  lawyers'  battle, 
and  McCormick  was  finally  defeated  by 
Stanton,  who  made  an  unanswerably  elo- 
quent speech.  For  this  speech  Stanton 
received  ^10,000,  and  Lincoln,  who  had  made 
no  speech  at  all,  was  given  $1,000.  Yet,  in 
the  long  run,  the  man  who  profited  by  this 
lawsuit  was  Lincoln;  for  it  was  this  money 
that  enabled  him  to  carry  on  his  famous 
debate  with  Douglas,  and  thus  made  him 
the  inevitable  candidate  of  the  Republican 
Party. 

McCormick's  most  disastrous  lawsuit  was 
with  D.  M.  Osborne  and  the  Gordon  brothers, 
of    Rochester.     In    1875    the    Gordons    had 


58  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

invented  an  attachment  for  a  wire  self-binder, 
and  in  a  careless  moment  McCormick  had 
signed  a  contract  promising  to  make  these 
self-binders  and  to  pay  ^10  royalty  on  every 
machine.  Then  a  man  named  Withington 
appeared  with  a  much  better  self-binder. 
McCormick  at  once  began  to  make  the 
Withington  machine  and  was  sued  by  the 
Gordons. 

At  this  time  McCormick  was  over  seventy 
years  of  age,  and  crippled  with  rheumatism; 
but  he  believed  that  the  Gordons  had  deceived 
him  and  he  fought  them  sternly  as  long 
as  he  lived.  After  his  death,  his  eldest  son, 
Cyrus,  consented  to  a  compromise,  whereby 
Osborne,  who  was  owner  of  a  share  in  the 
Gordon  concern,  and  the  Gordons  were  to  be 
paid  1^225, 000.  But  in  order  to  impress 
upon  them  the  enormity  of  this  amount,  he 
prepared  the  money  for  them  in  small  bills. 
When  they  called  at  the  McCormick  office 
in  Chicago,  they  v/ere  taken  to  a  small  room 
on  the  top  floor  and  shown  a  great  pyramid 
of  green  currency. 

"There  is  your  money,"  said  McCormick's 
lawyer.  "Kindly  count  it  and  see  if  it  is  not 
a  quarter  of  a  million  dollars." 


The  Story  of  Deering  59 

The  three  men  gasped  with  mingled 
ecstasy  and  consternation.  "  B  —  b  —  but,'* 
stammered  one  of  them,  "how  can  we  take  it 
away  ?     Can't  you  give  us  a  cheque  ?" 

"That  is  the  right  amount,  in  legal  money, 
gentlemen,"  replied  the  lawyer.  "All  I  will 
say  is  that  there  are  a  couple  of  old  valises  in 
the  closet  —  and  I  wish  you  good  afternoon." 

For  several  hours  Osborne  and  the  Gor- 
dons literally  waded  in  affluence,  counting 
the  money  and  packing  it  in  the  valises.  By 
the  time  they  had  finished,  it  was  eight 
o'clock.  The  building  was  dark.  The  ele- 
vator was  not  running.  They  were  hungry 
and  terrified.  Step  by  step  they  groped 
their  trembling  way  downstairs,  and  stag- 
gered with  their  treasure  through  the  perilous 
streets  to  the  Grand  Pacific  Hotel.  None  of 
them  ever  forgot  the  terror  of  that  night. 

Another  warlike  Reaper  King  was  "Bill" 
"Whiteley,  of  Ohio.  Whiteley  had  invented 
a  combined  mower  and  reaper  in  1858, 
which  he  named  the  "Champion";  and  he 
pushed  this  machine  with  an  irresistible 
enthusiasm. 

His  mode  of  attack  was  not  tne  patent  suit, 
but  the  field  test.     This   was   the   white-hot 


6o  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

climax  of  the  rivalry  among  the  reaper  kings; 
and  it  was  great  sport  for  the  farmers.  It 
was  a  reaper  circus  —  a  fierce  chariot-race 
in  a  wheat-field;  and  its  influence  upon  the 
industry  was  remarkable.  It  weeded  out  the 
low-grade  machines.  It  spurred  on  the 
manufacturers  to  a  campaign  of  improvement. 
It  developed  American  harvesters  to  the 
highest  point  of  perfection.  It  swung  the 
farmers  into  the  new  path  of  scientific 
agriculture.  And  it  piled  expenses  so 
high  that  few  of  the  reaper  kings  escaped 
disaster. 

A  field  test  was  conducted  in  this  fashion: 
A  committee  of  judges  was  appointed,  and 
several  acres  of  ripe  grain  were  selected  as 
the  battle-field.  After  the  field  was  marked 
off  into  equal  sections,  each  reaper  took  its 
place.  There  were  sometimes  two  reapers 
and  sometimes  forty.  The  signal  was  given. 
"Crack"  —  the  horses  leaped;  the  drivers 
shouted;  and  hundreds  of  farmers  surged 
up  and  down  in  excited  crowds. 

"All  's  fair  in  a  field  test,"  said  the  reaper 
agents  who  superintended  these  contests; 
though  each  man  said  it  to  himself.  They 
were  a  hardy  and  reckless  body  of  men,  half 


ASA  S.  HUSHNELL 


BENIAMIN   H.   WARDER 


HON.  THOMAS  MOTT  (isl'.oKM 


DAVID   M.  OSBORNE 


The  Story  of  Deering  6l 

cowboy,  half  mechanic,  and  no  trick  was  too 
dangerous  or  too  desperate  for  them.  Often 
the  feud  was  so  bitter  that  bodyguards  of 
big-fisted  "bulldozers"  were  on  the  spot  to 
protect  the  warrior  of  their  tribe  who  was  in 
danser.     "I    had    four    men   with    me   once 

O 

who  together  weighed  i,ooo  pounds,"  said 
A.  E.  Mayer,  who  is  now  the  general  of  an 
army  of  40,000  salesmen.  In  most  tests  the 
machines  were  shamefully  abused.  Self- 
binders  were  made  to  cut  and  bind  stubble 
as  though  it  were  grain.  Mowers  were 
driven  full  tilt  against  stumps  and  hop-poles. 
Rival  reapers  were  chained  back  to  back  and 
yanked  apart  by  plunging  horses.  The 
warrior  agents  exposed  the  weak  points  in 
each  other's  machines.  They  photographed 
each  other's  breakdowns,  and  bragged  to  the 
limit  of  their  vocabularies.  They  raised 
prices  in  one  town  and  cut  them  in  the  next; 
for  when  their  fighting  blood  was  aroused  — ■ 
and  that  was  often  —  they  cared  no  more 
for  profits  than  a  small  boy  cares  for  his 
clothes. 

To  give  only  one  instance  out  of  hundreds, 
here  is  a  picture  of  a  field  test  that  I  found 
in  the  diary  of  B.  B.  Clarke,  of  Madison,  who 


62  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

is  now  the  editor  of  the  American  Thresher- 
man,  but  who  was  in  the  eighties  a  harvester 
fighter  in  Indiana. 

"We  drove  fourteen  miles  to  tne  wheat- 
field,  which  was  also  the  battle-field,"  he 
wrote,  "and  found  a  heavy  crop  of  rank  grain, 
wild  pea  vines,  morning  glories  and  other 
vegetation,  which  tested  both  machines  to  the 
limit.  The  bundles  were  twisted  together 
by  the  vines  into  almost  a  continuous  rope. 
After  adjusting  the  machine,  we  had  to  'open 
the  field.'  This  is  considered  the  most 
severe  test,  as  the  machine,  the  horses  and 
all  are  in  the  grain. 

"A drove    the    team,    a    magnificent 

pair  of  big  grays.     McK watched   the 

binder,  while  Y and  I  created  sympathy 

for  our  cause  among  the  farmers  who  had 
come  to  see  the  fight.     With  a  crack  of  his 

whip  and  a  shout  to  his  team,  A opened 

the  ball.  The  machine  was  so  crowded 
with  grain  and  weeds  that  the  sickle  could 
not  be  heard  fifty  feet  away.  He  cleared 
the  first  round  without  a  stop.  Then  the 
other  machine  followed,  but  the  driver, 
failing  to  recognise  the  necessity  of  fast 
driving,   allowed   his   machine   to   clog,   and 


\ 


The  Story  of  Deering  63 

lost  the  day.  We  received  two  hundred 
dollars  in  gold  on  the  spot  for  our  victorious 
binder. 

"On  returning  to  Fort  Wayne  we  found 

the  E people,  whose  headquarters  were 

separated  by  a  partition  wall  from  ours, 
had  coaxed  one  of  our  customers  to  cancel 
his  order,  and  substitute  their  machine. 
For  this  act,  we  retaliated  and  replaced 
three  of  their  orders  the  following  week, 
and  while  loading  these  into  the  farmers' 
wagons  a  fight  took  place  between  the 
opposing  factions.  I  looked  as  though  I  had 
encountered  a  flax-hackle.  The  next  day 
hostilities   opened   early  with   three   on   our 

side  to  six  of  the   E host,   requiring  a 

riot  alarm  and  a  wagon-load  of  police  to 
restore  order. 

"We  had  swept  the  enemy  before  us, 
using  neck-yokes,  pitman  rods  and  even 
six  shooters  in  the  grand  finale.  Our  ex- 
pense account  for  that  week  included  fifty 
dollars  for  lawyers'  fees,  which  was  promptly 
O.  K'd  by  the  manager.  After  all,  I  had 
only  obeyed  instructions,  which  were  to 
get  the  business  and  hold  up  prices,  'peace- 
ably if  you  can,  but  forcibly  if  you  must.'" 


64  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

An  interesting  relic  of  these  fierce  days  of 
cut-throat  competition  was  given  to  me  by 
Mr.  John  F.  Steward.    It  reads  as  follows: — 

To  Agents  for  the  Sals,  of  Harvesting ;MACniNERy : 

The  undersigned,  manufacturers  of  harvesting  machinery,  call  the 
attention  of  their  travelling  experts  and  local  agents  to  a  practice  which  has 
grown  among  them  for  a  few  years  past,  and  which  has  become  so  disrepu- 
table and  is  carried  to  such  an  extent  that  we  feel  it  necessary  to  bring  it  to 
your  special  notice.  //  is  the  habit  0]  trying  to  break  up  sales  made  by  otiier 
agents  when  yon  have  not  been  siiccessjiil  in  securing  the  sale.  It  has 
become  a  very  common  practice,  as  soon  as  a  sale  is  made  by  one  agent,  lor 
the  agents  ot  all  other  machines  to  try  to  break  up  that  sale,  by  misrepresen- 
tations or  by  lowering  the  price,  or  by  trying  to  convince  the  purchaser  that 
the  machine  which  he  has  bargained  for  is  not  as  good  as  the  one  which  the 
other  agent  sells.  This  practice  is  disreputable,  and  should  not  be  tolerated 
by  any  manufacturer.  We  wish  it  now  thoroughly  understood  that  we  will  not 
tolerate  this  practice  in  any  agent,  and  we  will  be  glad  to  have  reports  from 
you  of  the  agenls.of  any  machines  who  have  tried  to  break  up  your  sales  of 
our  machines  in  this  way.  There  is  nothing  that  tends  more  to  demoralise 
business  than  this  practice,  and  we  wish  it  stopped. 

Machines  should  be  sold  upon  their  merits,  and  not  by  disparaging  or 
running  down  other  machines.  You  will  find  that  your  customers  will  place 
more  reliance  upon  what  you  say  if  you  leave  all  other  machines  alone,  and 
show  the  good  features  of  your  own  and  demonstrate  them  in  actual  work. 
An  agent  never  makes  any  progress  by  running  down  or  trying  to  show  the 
defects  of  others,  and  you  will  be  better  able  to  sustain  your  prices  and  the 
reputation  of  your  machines  by  following  the  course  indicated  above. 
Therefore,  it  is  our  wish  that  you  should  hold  to  your  prices  firmly,  present 
your  machines  in  the  very  best  possible  light,  and  use  all  honourable  means 
for  making  a  fair  and  honest  sale  ;  but  if  you  are  unfortunate  enough  to  loss 
your  sale,  and  some  competitor  gains  it,  don't  be  persuaded  to  put  yours  in 
the  field  by  the  side  of  your  competitor,  or  try  in  any  way  to  break  up  the 
sale ;  and  do  not,  until  the  purchaser  has  discarded  another  machine,  offer 
to  put  one  of  ours  in  its  place. 

Of  course  we  do  not  mean  by  this  that  you  shall  stand  quietly  by  and 
see  other  agents  break  up  your  sales,  or  if  others  habitually  do  this  that  you 
shall  not  retaliate,  but  you  must  not  be  the  first  to  inaugurate  this  practice. 
We  are  always  ready  to  meet  fair  and  honest  competition. 

We  want  our  business  conducted  in  a  fair  and  honourable  way,  and  not 
descend  to  v/ays  that  are  discreditable  to  us  and  to  you.  No  one  agent  can 
expect  to  seU  all  the  machines  that  are  wanted  in  liis  district,  for  the  poorest 
machine  will  have  some  friends,  and,  though  he  may  have  the  very  best  one, 
we  do  not  expect  he  will  make  every  one  see  it.  Let  the  purchaser  take  the 
risk.  If  he  buys  an  inferior  macWne  he  should  take  the  consequences,  as  if 
he  was  deceived  or  mistaken  in  his  judgment  in  buying  a  horse.  In  such  a 
case  you  would  not  think  of  putting  your  horse  in  work  the  purchaser  was 
doing,  to  show  him  yours  was  the  best,  with  the  expectation  that  he  would 
return  the  one  he  had  bought  because  it  did  not  prove  quite  equal  to  youis 
in  drawing  a  load  or  in  driving.  If  you  would  not  in  the  case  of  a  horse, 
why  should  you,  in  the  case  of  a  mower,  reaper,  or  self-binding  harvester? 
Our  advice  to  you  is: 


The  Story  of  Deering  65 

iBt.     Hold  firmly  to  your  prices. 

2d.       Sell   your   own   machino.     Convince   your   purchaser 
that  you  have  the  best  machine  made. 

3d.       Settle  for  the  machine  at  time  of  delivery.   A  machino 
works  much  better  after  being  settled  for. 

4th.     If  you  lose  the  sale  do  not  try  to  break  up  the  sale  of    ""J 
your  competitor.     It  won't  pay. 


66  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

The  king  of  the  field  test  was  William 
N.  Whiteley.  No  other  reaper  king,  in  any 
country,  received  as  much  renown  from  his 
personal  exploits.  He  was  the  Charlemagne 
of  the  harvest-field.  He  was  as  tall  as  a 
sapling  and  as  strong  as  a  tree.  As  a  pro- 
fessor in  the  great  field  school  of  agriculture, 
he  has  never  been  surpassed.  He  could  out- 
talk,  outwork,  and  generally  outwit  the  men 
who  were  sent  against  him.  He  was  a 
whole  exhibition  in  himself.  "I  've  seen 
Bill  Whiteley  racin'  his  horses  through  the 
grain  and  leanin'  over  with  his  long  arms 
to  pick  the  mice's  nests  from  just  in  front 
of  the  knife,"  said  an  old  Ohio  settler. 

The  feat  that  first  made  Whiteley  famous 
was  performed  at  Jamestown,  Ohio,  in  1867. 
His  competitor  was  doing  as  good  work  as 
he  was;  whereupon  he  sprang  from  his  seat, 
unhitched  one  horse,  and  finished  his  course 
with  a  single,  surprised  steed  pulling  the 
heavy  machine.  His  competitor  followed 
suit,  and  succeeded  fully  as  well.  This 
enraged  Whiteley,  who  at  that  time  was  as 
powerful  as  a  young  Hercules. 

"I  can  pull  my  reaper  myself,"  he  shouted, 
turning  his  second  horse  loose,  and  yoking 


The  Story  of  Deering  67 

his  big  shoulders  into  its  harness.  Such  a 
thing  had  never  been  done  before,  and  has 
never  been  done  since;  but  it  is  true  that, 
in  the  passion  of  the  moment,  Whiteley  was 
filled  with  such  strength  that  he  ran  the 
reaper  from  one  side  of  the  field  to  the  other, 
cutting  a  full  swath  —  a  deed  that,  had  he 
done  it  in  ancient  Greece,  would  have  placed 
him  among  the  immortals.  It  was  witnessed 
by  five  hundred  farmers,  and  fully  reported 
in  the  press.  One  of  the  reporters,  as  it 
happened,  representing  the  Cincinnati  Com- 
mercial, was  a  young  Ohioan  named  White- 
law  Reid,  now  the  American  Ambassador  to 
the  Court  of  St.  James. 

That  ten  minutes  in  a  horse  collar  made 
;$2,ooo,ooo  for  Whiteley.  His  antagonist, 
Bejamin  H.  Warder,  was  filled  with  admira- 
tion for  Whiteley's  prowess,  and  at  once 
proposed  that  they  should  quit  fighting  and 
work  in  harmony. 

"Give  me  the  right  to  maKe  your  reaper 
and  I  'II  pay  you  ^5  apiece  for  all  I  can  sell," 
said  Warder.  "It's  a  bargain,"  responded 
Whiteley.  And  so  there  arose  the  first 
consolidation    in    the    harvester    business. 

Whiteley  and  Warder  did  not  merge  their 


68  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

companies;  but  they  divided  the  United 
States  into  three  parts  —  one  for  Whiteley, 
one  for  his  brother  Amos,  who  also  made 
reapers  in  Springfield,  and  one  for  Warder. 
They  united  in  building  a  malleable  iron 
foundry  and  a  knife  works,  so  that  they 
could  use  better  materials  at  a  lower  cost. 
They  made  the  first  handsome  and  shapely 
machines. 

For  twelve  years  this  triple  alliance  led 
the  way,  and  all  others,  even  the  mighty 
McCormick  and  the  sagacious  Deering,  had 
to  follow.  The  "Champion"  reaper  be- 
came the  leading  machine  of  the  United 
States,  and  the  little  town  of  Springfield, 
Ohio,  was  known  as  the  "Reaper  City." 
As  many  as  160,000  reapers  and  mowers 
were  sent  out  as  a  year's  work.  In  all, 
2,000,000  of  Whiteley's  "Champion"  ma- 
chines have  been  made  in  Springfield,  and 
have  sold  at  a  gain  of  ^18,000,000. 

As  the  millions  came  pouring  in  so  fast, 
Whiteley's  head  was  turned  and  he  began 
to  run  amuck.  He  cut  loose  from  Warder 
and  from  his  ov/n  partners,  Fassler  and 
Kelly,  opened  war  on  the  Knights  of  Labour, 
built  the  biggest  reaper  factory  in  the  world, 


The  Story  of  Deering  69 

became  a  railroad  president,  helped  to  corner 
the  Chicago  wheat  market,  backed  the 
"Strasburg  Clock"  —  an  absurd  self-binder 
that  was  as  big  as  a  pipe-organ  — and  came 
crashing  down  in  a  failure  that  jarred  the 
farminji  world  from  end   to  end. 

Whiteley  lost  millions  in  this  crash  — 
and  with  comparative  indifference.  It  was 
never  the  profits  that  he  fought  for.  At 
heart  he  was  a  sportsman  rather  than  a 
money-maker.  He  craved  the  excitement 
of  the  race  itself  more  than  the  prizes.  To 
win  —  that  was  the  ambition  of  his  life. 
And  he  did  not  shrink  from  spectacular 
methods  to  accomplish  his  ambition. 

For  instance,  nothing  less  would  satisfy 
him,  when  he  exhibited  at  the  Philadelphia 
Centennial,  than  a  quarter-sized  reaper,  made 
daintily  of  rosewood  and  gold.  This  brought 
him  so  sudden  a  rush  of  orders  from  the  East 
that  in  one  day  of  the  following  year  he  sent 
seventy  loaded  cars  to  Baltimore.  With 
flags  flying  and  brass  bands  playing,  these 
cars  rolled  off,  with  orders  to  travel  only  by 
daylight.  When  they  arrived  in  Harrisburg, 
running  in  three  sections,  they  caught  the 
eye    of    a    railroad    superintendent    named 


70  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

McCrea  —  who  is  now,  by  the  way,  president 
of  the  Pennsylvania  Railroad.  McCrea  saw 
a  chance  to  advertise  his  railway  as  well  as 
Whiteley's  reapers,  so  he  linked  the  seventy 
cars  together  into  one  three-quarter-mile 
train,  put  his  biggest  engine  at  the  front,  and 
sent  the  gaudy  caravan  on   its  way. 

Whiteley  never  knew  how  to  be  common- 
place, even  in  the  smallest  matters.  Wher- 
ever he  went,  his  trail  was  marked  by  stories 
of  his  exploits  and  his  oddities.  How  he 
organised  the  famous  "White  Plug  Hat 
Brigade"  in  the  Blaine  campaign  —  how 
he  made  a  tvv^elve-hour  speech  to  help 
"Mother"  Stewart  close  up  the  saloons  of 
Springfield  —  how  he  found  a  Springfield 
farmer  using  a  McCormick  reaper,  gave  him 
a  Whiteley  reaper  in  its  place,  and  flung  the 
rival  machine  upon  the  junk-pile,  as  a  sign 
that  he  was  the  monarch  of  Ohio  —  how  he 
gathered  up  a  peck  of  pies  after  a  field  test 
dinner,  put  them  in  a  sack,  and  ate  nothing 
but  pies  for  half  a  week  —  such  is  the  sort 
of  anecdotes  that  his  life  has  added  to  the 
folklore  of  the  Western  farmers. 

Many  a  time  his  vaudeville  tactics  dis- 
gusted and  enraged  his  fellow  manufacturers; 


The  Story  of  Deering  7 1 

but  he  was  too  big  a  factor  to  be  ignored. 
Once,  when  a  number  of  reaper  kings  had 
met  together  to  see  if  they  could  rescue  their 
business  from  its  riot  of  rivalry,  the  chairman 
opened  the  discussion  with  the  question  — 
"What  ought  we  to  do  to  improve  the 
conditions  of  our  trade?"  For  a  moment 
there  was  silence,  and  then  John  P.  Adri- 
ance  —  as  mild-natured  a  man  as  ever 
lived— said   blandly,   "Kill   Whiteley." 

With  daring  originality  Whiteley  combined 
a  tremendous  physical  vitality  and  a  brain 
that  fairly  effervesced  w^ith  inventiveness. 
He  probably  holds  the  record  among  the 
reaper-men  for  inventions,  with  125  patents 
in  his  name.  And  he  would  work  twenty- 
four  hours  at  a  stretch,  without  a  yawn.  One 
evening  he  asked  a  young  machinist  to 
remain  in  the  factory  and  help  him  fix  a 
refractory  reaper.  After  working  till  mid- 
night Whiteley  said:  "Well,  Jim,  I  suppose 
you  think  you  are  tired.  Go  home  and  have 
a  good  night's  sleep,  and  come  back  here  in 
three  hours." 

He  dashed  with  fanatical  energy  into  any 
undertaking  that  appealed  to  his  imagination. 
Once,   when   he   had   too   much   money,   he 


72  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

bought  control  of  a  new  railway  that  ran 
through  Ohio  from  Springfield  to  Jackson, 
—  1 60  miles.  He  wanted  to  know  its  real 
value,  so,  instead  of  asking  the  directors  a 
few  questions,  as  other  men  would  have  done, 
Whiteley  travelled  over  the  entire  length  of 
the  railroad,  on  foot. 

When  I  saw  Whiteley,  last  June,  he  was 
time-worn  and  whitened.  Since  the  great 
failure,  he  has  been  in  the  harvester  business 
only  intermittently.  He  has  long  outlived 
his  Golden  Age,  but  he  is  as  busy  as  ever, 
with  a  new  scheme  and  a  new  factory.  And 
he  still  wears  the  Scotch  cap  and  long  boots 
that  have  been  familiar  at  field  tests  for 
more  than  half  a  century. 

Of  the  other  Springfield  men,  Warder 
was  unquestionably  the  ablest.  "He  was 
the  main  wheel,"  said  Whiteley.  As  a 
young  man  of  twenty-seven  he  was  running 
a  sawmill  in  Springfield  when  he  first  heard 
of  the  reaper.  He  was  so  impressed  with  its 
possibilities  that  he  offered  the  inventor 
^30,000  for  a   share   in   it. 

"Young  Warder  is  crazy,"  said  Spring- 
field people,  for  at  that  time  ^30,000  was  a 
fortune  and  a  reaper  was  a  fad.     But  thirty- 


The  Story  of  Deering  73 

five  years  later,  when  Warder  had  removed 
to  Washington  and  become  noted  among  its 
social  entertainers,  his  investment  had  multi- 
plied  itself  very  nearly  two   hundredfold. 

Warder  had  associated  with  him  two 
partners,  Asa  S.  Bushnell  and  J.  J.  Glessner. 
Bushnell  began  earning  his  living  in  boy- 
hood as  a  clerk  at  $5  a  month,  and  stumbled 
into  a  business  career  as  a  druggist.  Then 
he  became  Warder's  understudy,  and  piled 
up  twice  as  many  millions  as  he  could  count 
on  his  fingers.  'As  a  climax  he  rose  higher  in 
public  life  than  any  other  reaper  king,  by 
serving  twice  as  the  Governor  of  Ohio.  As 
for  J.  J.  Glessner,  he  is  still  active,  and  one 
of  the  dozen  solid  pillars  upon  which  the 
International    Harvester   Company   is    built. 

Such  were  the  strong  men  whom  William 
Deering  faced  v/hen  he  came,  without  a  shred 
of  experience,  into  the  harvester  world.  He 
had  no  ancient  patent-rights,  like  McCor- 
mick.  He  could  not  outrace  thirty  com- 
petitors in  a  wheat-field,  like  Whiteley  and 
Jones  and  Adriance  and  Osborne.  One 
way  was   left  open  to   him. 

"I'll  beat  them,"  he  said,  "by  making  a 
better  machine." 


74  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

He  set  out  upon  such  a  search  for  improve- 
ments that,  during  the  rest  of  his  Hfe,  inven- 
tors fluttered  around  him  like  moths  around  a 
candle.  Until  1879,  the  best  harvester  Vv^as 
a  self-binder  that  tied  the  sheaves  with  wire. 
It  was  the  invention  of  Sylvanus  D.  Locke, 
and  had  been  developed  to  its  highest  point 
of  perfection  by  a  farm-bred  inventor  named 
C.  B.  Withington,  who  is  still  living  in  Wis- 
consin. The  Withington  machine  was 
pushed  by  McCormick  with  great  energy, 
and  fifty  thousand  v/ere  sold  between  1877 
and  1885.  It  was  a  marvelously  simple 
mechanism,  consistingly  mainly  of  two  steel 
fingers  that  moved  back  and  forth,  and 
twisted  a  wire  band  around  each  sheaf  of 
grain.  As  a  machine  it  was  a  complete 
success;  but  the  farmers  disliked  it. 

"The  wire  will  mix  with  the  straw,"  they 
said,  "and  our  horses  and  cattle  will  be 
killed." 

So,  when  Deering  met  John  F.  Appleby, 
a  stocky  mechanic  who  claimed  to  have 
invented  a  twine  self-binder,  he  at  once  set 
him  to  work  upon  fifty  of  the  new  machines. 

When  Deering  saw  his  first  Appleby 
binder  at  v/ork  in  a  field  of  wheat,  he  was 


The  Story  of  Deering  75 

enthralled.  Here,  at  last,  was  the  perfect 
harvester.  Its  strong  steel  arms  could 
flash  a  cord  around  a  bundle  of  grain,  tie  a 
knot,  cut  the  cord,  and  fling  oflT  the  sheaf, 
too  quickly  for  the  eye  to  follow.  It  seemed 
magical. 

"What  am  I  to  do.?"  asked  the  farmer 
who  bought  the  first  of  these  machines,  as  he 
climbed  upon  the  seat  and  prepared  to  cut 
his  grain. 

"Do!"  exclaimed  John  Webster,  the  Deer- 
ing mechanic.  "Do  nothing!  Drive  the 
Horses." 

The  amazed  farmer  started  the  horses, 
drove  around  the  field,  and  came  back 
swinging  his  hat  and  shouting  like  a  lunatic 
—  as  well  he  might.  For  in  the  trail  of  his 
harvester  the  sheaves  lay  bound,  as  though 
there  were  some  kindly  genie  hidden  among 
its  wheels. 

Deering  owned,  at  that  time,  not  much 
more  than  a  million  dollars  —  the  gleanings 
of  thirty-five  industrious  years.  But  he 
resolved  to  stake  it  all  upon  this  amazing 
machine.  If  he  lost  —  he  would  be  a  poor 
man  at  fifty-three.  If  he  won  —  he  would 
be  the  harvester  king  of  the  world. 


76  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

"  I  'II  move  the  factory  to  Chicago  and 
make  3,000  of  these  Appleby  twine-binders 
at  once,"  he  said. 

His  partner,  E.  H.  Gammon,  held  back,  so 
the  inflexible  Deering  bought  him  out,  and 
from  that  day  he,  like  his  greatest  competitor, 
McCormick,  ran  a  one-man  business. 

"Did  you  hear  the  news  about  Deering?" 
gossiped  his  fellow  manufacturers.  "Clean 
crazy  on  a  twine-binder!" 

And,  far  m.ore  discouraging,  the  magical 
self-binder  itself  suddenly  became  ill-hum- 
ored and  refused  to  form  its  sheaves  properly. 
It  was  no  easy  exploit,  as  any  one  may  see, 
to  make  the  first  3,000  of  such  complex 
machines.  No  other  artificial  mechanism 
must  so  combine  strength  and  delicacy.  No 
piano  nor  Hoe  press,  for  instance,  is  expected 
to  operate  while  it  is  being  jerked  over  a 
rough  field  or  along  the  steep  slant  of  a  hill. 

One  day  in  the  early  spring  of  1880,  Deer- 
ing and  his  chief  lieutenants  —  Steward  and 
Dixon  —  were  in  a  field  of  rye  near  Alton, 
trying  to  coax  the  new  harvester  to  do  its 
work.  All  day  long  it  was  obstinate  and 
perverse,  and  the  men  were  at  their  wits' 
end. 


The   Story  of  Deering  77 

"Well,  boys,"  said  Deering,  "if  we  can't 
do  better    than  this,    I  '11  lose  $1,000,000." 

"Try  one  more  day,"  said  Steward. 
They  went  to  their  hotel,  and  as  it  happened 
to  be  crowded,  the  three  were  placed  in  a 
large  double  room. 

"Steward  and  Dixon  were  mad  at  me  the 
next  morning,"  said  Deering,  when  he  told 
me  of  that  critical  occasion.  "They  had 
nothing  at  stake,  yet  they  had  lain  awake 
all  night;  while  I  was  apparently  about  to 
lose  my  only  million,  and  had  slept  like 
a  log." 

That  day  a  slight  change  was  made,  and 
the  harvester  became  good-natured  and 
obedient.  The  whole  3,000  machines  were 
sold,  and  created  as  much  excitement  as 
3,000  miracles.  They  swept  away  competi- 
tors like  chaff.  Of  a  hundred  manufacturers 
seventy-eight  were  winnowed  out.  Instead 
of  losing  his  fortune,  Deering  cleared  at  once 
about  four  hundred  thousand  dollars,  for 
profits  were  large  in  those  experimental 
days.  Better  still,  he  became  an  acknowl- 
edged leader  of  his  class.  He  had  taken 
the  right  line  of  development,  as  McCormick 
had    in    1831,    and    all    others    who    could, 


78  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

choked  down  their  rage  and  followed  — 
quick   march! 

The  man  who  had  found  the  right  path  was 
John  F.  Appleby.  He  was  the  scout  — the  Kit 
Carson  of  the  harvester  business.  It  was  he 
—  the  inspired  farm  labourer  of  Wisconsin  — 
who  had  hurled  another  great  impossibility 
out  of  the  way  of  the  world's  farmers. 

He  did  not  of  course  originate  the  whole 
self-binder.  But  he  put  the  parts  together 
in  the  right  way  and  pushed  ahead  to  success 
through  a  wilderness  of  failure.  There  was 
a  notable  group  of  inventors  in  Rockford 
who  did  much  to  put  him  on  the  right  track. 
One  of  these,  Marquis  L.  Gorham,  was  the 
originator  of  the  self-sizing  device  that  regu- 
lates the  size  of  the  bound  sheaf.  Another, 
named  Jacob  Behel,  invented  a  knotter, 
whittling  it  out  of  a  branch  of  a  cherry  tree. 

Appleby  has  been,  and  is  yet,  a  knight- 
errant  of  industry.  He  takes  his  pay  in 
adventure.  He  dislikes  to  travel  with  the 
crov/d.  When  I  saw  him  first,  in  his  Chicago 
workshop,  his  thoughts  were  far  from  twine- 
binders.  He  was  engaged  on  the  task  of 
perfecting  a  cotton-picker,  which  he  hopes 
will  do  as  much  for  the  South  as  his  self- 


The  Story  of  Deering  79 

binder  did  for  the  West.  And  it  was  with 
some  difficulty  that  I  could  persuade  him  to 
disentangle  the  story  of  the  twine-binder 
from  the  various  other  romances  of  his  life. 

In  1855  Appleby  was  a  rugged  youngster 
doing  chores  on  a  farm  for  one  dollar  a  week. 
Even  this  rate  of  pay  was  too  high  to  the 
mind  of  the  farmer  who  employed  him;  for 
he  was  always  whittling  and  making  toy 
machinery,  instead  of  minding  his  work. 

One  day,  when  Appleby  was  seventeen, 
he  v.'as  binding  grain  after  a  reaper.  "  How 
do  you  like  the  work,  Jack  ?"  asked  the 
farmer. 

"I  don't  like  it,"  said  Jack,  "and  what  's 
more,  I  believe  I  can  invent  a  machine  to  tie 
these  bundles." 

"Ho!  ho!"  laughed  the  farmer.  "You 
little  fool,  you   can't  invent  anything." 

Twenty-five  years  later,  when  Appleby 
had  made  half  a  million  by  his  invention, 
and  was  manager  of  a  factory  at  Minneapolis, 
he  noticed  an  old  man  pushing  a  wheel- 
barrow in  the  factory  yard. 

"Haven't  I  seen  you  before?"  he  asked. 

"Yes,  sir,"  replied  the  old  man.  "I  was 
the  farmer  who  gave  you  your  first  job." 


So  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

"Well,"  said  Appleby,  "you  see  1  was  n't 
a   little   fool   after   all." 

Appleby  actually  had  set  to  work  to  invent 
a  knotting-machine  when  he  was  a  farm-boy 
of  seventeen,  and  had  made  his  first  model 
at  that  age  —  in  1858.  A  young  school- 
teacher named  Chester  W.  Houghton  was 
the  first  man  who  put  money  back  of  the 
boy's  invention.  He  stood  behind  it  to  the 
extent  of  fifty  dollars,  and  then  became 
alarmed  at  such  a  reckless  speculation,  and 
quit.  Had  he  been  just  a  little  more  adven- 
turous, and  a  little  more  patient,  every 
dollar  of  his  investment  would  have  fruited 
into  a  thousand. 

When  the  school-teacher  deserted  him, 
and  wanted  the  fifty  dollars  back,  Appleby 
was  discouraged.  The  models  that  had  been 
made  at  a  gun  shop  in  Palmyra,  Wisconsin, 
drifted  about.  They  were  sold  at  auction 
on  one  occasion  for  seventeen  cents;  and  the 
buyer  thought  they  were  not  worth  even  that, 
for  he  made  a  present  of  them  to  Appleby. 
Then  came  the  crash  of  the  Civil  War. 
Appleby  enlisted,  and  for  four  years  forgot 
knotters  and  thought  only  of  guns. 

Yet  while  he  lay  in  the  trenches  at  Vicks- 


The  Story  of  Deering  8l 

burg,  he  whittled  out  a  new  device  for  rifles. 
After  the  war,  a  capitalist  saw  this  device, 
gave  him  ^500  for  it,  and  then,  before 
Appleby's  eyes,  sold  a  half  interest  in  it  for 
$'j,OQO.  This  awakened  Appleby  to  the 
value  of  inventions  and  made  him  an  inventor 
for  life. 

Once  more  he  set  to  work  on  his  long- 
neglected  grain-binder,  and  in  1867  he 
drove  his  first  completed  machine  into  a  field 
near  Mazomanie,  Wisconsin.  The  horses 
were  fractious,  and  after  being  jerked  along 
for  several  rods,  the  machine  broke  down, 
to  the  great  delight  of  the  spectators,  most 
of  whom  knew  Appleby  and  regarded  him 
as  a  crank.  But  the  machine  had  bound  a 
couple  of  sheaves  before  it  broke.  Appleby 
displayed  these,  and  one  man  —  Dr.  E.  D. 
Bishop  —  pulled  a  roll  of  money  from  his 
pocket  and   handed   it  to  the   inventor. 

"Take  this,"  he  said,  "and  make  me  a 
partner.  Your  invention  will  be  a  world's 
wonder  some  day." 

All  told.  Dr.  Bishop  staked  $1,500  on 
Appleby's  genius,  for  which,  twelve  years 
later,  he  drew  out  $80,000.  This  was  the 
first  of  the  many  incidental  fortunes  scattered 


82  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

right  and  left  in  the  path  of  the  self-binder, 
which  began  in  1880,  to  sweep  forward  as 
gloriously  as  the  triumphal  car  of  a  Roman 
emperor. 

As  for  William  Deering  —  the  modest 
manufacturer  from  Maine,  who  in  1879 
joined  forces  with  Appleby,  no  sooner  had 
he  sold  the  3,000  self-binders  than  he  found 
himself  floundering  neck  deep  in  an  un- 
expected sea  of  troubles.  There  was  not  a 
flaw  in  the  binders.  They  were  cutting 
and  tying  the  grain  with  the  skill  of  60,000 
men.  But  the  twine-bill!  Three  thousand 
farmers   swore  that  it  was   too  high. 

Twine  was  an  item  that  they  had  never 
in  their  lives  bought  in  large  quantities.  To 
pay  fifty  dollars  —  the  price  of  a  horse  — 
for  mere  string  that  was  used  once  and  then 
flung  away,  seemed  outrageous.  It  was  like 
buying  daily  papers  by  the  thousand,  or 
shoe-laces  by  the  ton.  And  so  it  came 
about  that  though  Deering  had  reduced  the 
cost  of  wheat  ten  per  cent.,  he  got  little 
thanks  for  his  superb  machines  —  nothing 
but  a  loud  and  angry  roar  for  better  and 
cheaper  twine. 

Deering  moved  against  this  new  array  of 


The  Story  of  Deering  83 

difficulties  with  quiet  and  inexorable  per- 
sistence. There  were  only  three  binder- 
twine  makers  in  the  United  States,  and  all 
warned  him  that  he  was  pursuing  a  will-o'- 
the-wisp.  But  Deering  pushed  on  until  he 
met  Edwin  H.  Fitler,  afterward  a  mayor  of 
Philadelphia.  From  the  unassuming  way  in 
which  Deering  stated  his  needs,  Fitler  con- 
cluded that  the  order  would  be  a  small  one. 

"What  you  want,"  he  said,  "is  a  single 
strand  twine,  w^hich  cannot  be  made  without 
a  new  line  of  machinery.  I  regret  to  say  that 
I  cannot  afford  to  do  this  for  one  customer." 

"Well,"  said  Deering,  "I  think  I  may  need 
a  good  deal  in  the  long  run,  though  I  wish  to 
begin  with  not  more  than  ten  car-loads." 

Ten  car-loads!  For  a  moment  Fitler  was 
dazed,  but  only  for  a  moment.  It  was  his 
chance  and  he  knew  it.  Years  afterward, 
he  was  fond  of  telling  how  he  "made  a 
million-dollar  deal  with  William  Deering  in 
two  minutes." 

Thus,  whatever  Deering  touched,  he  im- 
proved. He  became  the  servant  of  the 
harvester.  He  lavished  fortunes  upon  it  as 
sporting  millionaires  spent  fortunes  on  their 
horses.     It   was   his   one   extravagance.     In 


84  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

his  later  endeavours  to  make  the  twine 
cheaper,  he  spent  $15,000  on  grass  twine, 
;^35,ooo  on  paper,  1^43,000  on  straw,  and 
failed.  Then  he  spent  $165,000  on  flax  and 
succeeded.  He  was  for  thirty  years  a  sort 
of  paymaster  to  a  small  mob  of  inventors 
who  had  new  ideas  or  who  thought  they  had. 
There  was  one  very  able  inventor  —  John 
Stone  —  who  actually  drew  his  salary  and 
expenses  every  week  for  twenty  years,  until 
he  had  perfected  a  corn-picking  machine. 
From  first  to  last,  Deering  spent  "perhaps 
more  than  two  millions  of  dollars"  on 
improvements,  according  to  one  of  his 
closest   friends. 

The  fact  is  that  the  Appleby  binder  had 
transformed  Deering  from  a  man  in  business 
simply  to  make  money,  into  an  enthusiast. 
While  he  remained  as  careful  of  the  business 
as  ever,  he  began  to  enjoy  the  work  itself 
more  than  the  profit.  He  would  still  fuss  if 
he  saw  half  a  dozen  nails  in  the  sweepings,  or 
any  other  waste  of  pennies.  But  he  poured 
the  golden  flood  of  profits  back  into  his 
factory  with  a  recklessness  that  amazed  his 
friends.  He  pampered  his  beloved  machines 
with  roller  bearings  and  bodies  of  steel.     He 


The  Story  of  Deering  85 

sent  them  to  Europe  and  showed  them  to 
kings.  Then,  as  his  enthusiasm  grew,  he 
looked  ahead  to  the  time  when  even  the 
farm-horse  shall  be  set  free  from  drudgery; 
and  he  began  to  build  automobile  mowers 
and  gasolene  engines.  In  fact,  he  ripened, 
as  he  worked,  into  a  seer  who  saw  far  past 
the  gain  or  loss  of  the  present  into  the 
splendour  of  the  future. 

Sagacity  —  that  is,  perhaps,  the  one  word 
that  best  explains  William  Deering's  success. 
He  had  an  almost  supernatural  instinct,  so 
his  competitors  believed,  which  kept  him  in 
the  right  line  of  progress.  There  seemed 
to  be  a  business  compass  in  his  brain. 

He  was  never  a  master  of  men,  like  Mc- 
Cormick,  nor  a  good  mixer  among  men,  like 
Whiteley;  but  as  an  organiser  of  men  he  was 
easily  superior  to  them  both.  He  knew  how 
to  pit  his  managers  one  against  another,  as 
Carnegie  did;  and  how  to  develop  a  factory 
into  a  swift  and  automatic  machine.  He  was 
a  statesman  of  commercialism.  He  piled  up 
a   big  fortune,   and   earned   it. 

It  was  his  misfortune  not  to  have  been 
schooled  on  a  farm,  as  were  most  of  the 
great  reaper  kings.     McCormick,  Whiteley, 


86  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

Lewis  Miller,  Morgan,  Johnson,  Osborne, 
Sieberling,  Jones,  Esterley,  and  the  Marshes 
were  all  farm -bred.  But  Deering  was 
shrewd  enough  to  gather  around  him  a 
corps  of  men  who  had  the  experience  that  he 
lacked.  At  the  head  of  this  bodyguard  stood 
a  farmer's  son  —  John  F.  Steward.  Such 
were  the  versatility  and  the  loyalty  of  Steward 
that  he  became  Deering's  Grand  Vizier.  He 
was  inventive,  combative,  literary,  mechan- 
ical, litigious.  It  is  now  forty-two  years 
since  Steward  began  to  build  harvesters; 
and  he  has  ten  dozen  patents  to  his  credit. 

So,  what  with  the  mature  business  experi- 
ence of  Deering  himself,  and  the  skill  and 
faithfulness  of  his  captains,  the  little  factory 
that  he  had  begun  to  manage  in  1872  ex- 
panded in  thirty  years  into  one  of  the  two 
greatest  harvester  plants  in  the  world,  rolling 
out  in  every  workday  minute  two  complete 
machines   and   thirty    miles   of  twine. 

Largely  because  of  his  enterprise  the 
spectres  of  Famine  are  now  beaten  back 
in  fifty  countries,  yet  there  is  not  a  v/ord  of 
self-praise  in  his  conversation. 

"A  man  told  me  once  that  I  was  nothing 
more    than    a    promoter,"    he    said;    "and 


The  Story  of  Deering  87 

perhaps  he  was  right.  I  was  n't  an  inventor, 
that  's  true.  All  I  did  was  to  get  the  right 
men  and  tell  them  what  I  wanted  them  to  do; 
so  I  suppose  I  was  just  a  promoter." 

The  few  anecdotes  that  are  told  of  him 
relate  chiefly  to  his  overmodesty.  Once, 
when  he  was  travelling  through  Kansas  with 
John  Webster,  one  of  his  trusty  men,  a  big 
Westerner  loomed  up  in  front  of  him  and 
said: 

"Are  you  the  Deering  that  makes  the  self- 
binders  ?" 

"Yes,"  replied  Deering,  blushing  as  red  as 
one  of  his  own  mowers. 

"Well,"  said  the  Westerner,  shaking  him 
by  the  hand,  "  I  want  to  say  that  you  're  a 
mighty   smart   man." 

Deering  looked  thoroughly  uncomfortable, 
and  when  the  stranger  had  gone,  he  leaned 
over   to   Webster   and    said: 

"Think  of  him  saying  that  I  made  the 
binders  when  I  pay  you  fellows  for  making 
them.     I  never  felt  so  foolish  in  my  life." 

He  is  now  eighty-one  —  older  than  our 
oldest  railroad.  In  his  lifetime  he  has  seen 
his  country  grow  seven  times  in  population 
and  twenty-four  times  in  wealth. 


88  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

He  and  his  fellows  have  undeniably 
doubled  the  food  supply  of  the  world. 
More  —  they  said,  "Presto,  change!"  and 
the  drudges  of  the  harvest-fields  stood  up 
and  became  men.  They  have  made  life 
easier  and  nobler  for  untold  myriads  of 
people,  and  have  led  the  way  to  the  brightest 
era  of  peace  and  plenty  that  the  hunger- 
bitten  human   race   has  ever   known. 

Yet  less  than  thirty  of  the  reaper  kings 
became  millionaires.  Not  one  can  stand 
beside  the  great  financiers  of  steel  and  real 
estate  and  railroads.  And  not  one,  in  his 
whole  lifetime,  piled  up  as  much  profit  as  a 
Carnegie  or  a  Rockefeller  has  made  in  a 
single  year. 

The  get-rich-quick  brigands  of  Wall  Street 
meddled  with  the  harvester  business  once  — 
and  never  again.  That  was  twenty-one 
years  ago,  when  the  famous  "Binder-Twine 
Trust"  set  out  with  the  black  flag  flying. 
It  was  a  skyrocket  enterprise.  James  R. 
Keene  bulled  the  stock  up  to  136.  This 
was  the  first  and  only  "easy  money"  that 
was  ever  made  in  the  harvester  world.  Then 
the  farmers  and  the  reaper  kings  rose  up 
together     and    smote    the    Trust    in    twenty 


The  Story  of  Deering  89 

legislatures.  Its  stock  became  waste  paper; 
and  in  the  financial  hurricane  of  1893,  it 
was  the  first  victim. 

No  other  business  shows  so  tragic  a  death 
roll.  For  fifty  years  its  trail  was  marked  by 
wreckage  and  disaster.  Most  of  the  few 
who  succeeded  at  first,  failed  later.  Out  of 
every  ten  who  plunged  into  the  scrimmage, 
nine  crawled  out  whipped  or  terrified. 

And  so  the  Romance  of  the  Reaper  was 
for  fifty  years  a  tragedy  of  competition.  Out 
of  more  than  two  hundred  harvester  companies^ 
only  fourteen  survived  in  ig02;  and  these 
realised  that  if  such  waste  and  warfare  con- 
tinuedy  their  business  would  be  destroyed. 


CHAPTER  III 
The  International  Harvester  Company 

FOR  fifty  years  the  Harvester  Kings 
fought  one  another  in  the  open  field 
of  competition.  Their  armies  of  agents, 
drilled  in  the  arts  of  rivalry,  waged  a  war  in 
which  quarter  was  neither  given  nor  sought. 
It  was  a  fight  almost  of  extermination.  Out 
of  two  hundred  companies  that  went  to 
battle  with  flags  waving  and  drums  beating, 
less  than  a  dozen  came  home. 

David  M.  Osborne  backed  a  new  self- 
binder,  lost  a  million,  and  died  of  heart- 
break. J.  S.  Morgan,  who  had  a  small 
factory  at  Brockport,  saw  the  immense 
McCormick  and  Deering  plants  and  quit. 
Even  the  great  Whiteley  fell,  and  Lewis 
Miller,  the  father-in-law  of  Edison  and  the 
founder  of  Chautauqua,  went  down  "like  a 
great   tree    upon   the    hills." 

Walter  A.  Wood,  after  forty  years  of  suc- 
cess, took  Governor  Merriam  and  James  J. 
90 


The  International  Harvester  Company    91 

Hill  as  partners,  and  set  out  to  win  the  West 
for  the  Wood  Company.  Their  factory  was 
the  pride  of  St.  Paul.  Their  credit  was  the 
best,  and  their  fame  was  over  all  the  prairies. 
Yet  after  five  years  of  battling  they  surren- 
dered; and  not  one  harvester  is  made  to-day 
west   of  Illinois. 

It  is  a  common  opinion  among  harvester 
men  that  from  first  to  last  there  has  been 
more  money  put  into  the  business  than  has 
ever  been  taken  out  —  so  enormously  waste- 
ful were  these  years  of  competition.  By 
1902  the  harvester  business  was  merely  a 
terrific  and  destructive  war.  The  agents 
were  tearing  the  whole  industry  to  shreds 
and  tatters.  So  far  as  the  Harvester  Men 
could  see,  they  must  choose  between  combina- 
tion and  ruin. 

Not  one  of  them  was  personally  in  favour 
of  combination.  They  were  individualists 
through  and  through.  The  spirit  of  compe- 
tition had  been  bred  in  the  bone.  So,  w^hen 
several  of  them  came  together  to  check  this 
warfare,  it  was  not  of  their  own  free  will. 
It  was  because  they  could  do  nothing  else. 
They  were  hurled  together  by  social  forces 
over  which  they  had  no  control. 


gz  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

One  by  one  these  battle-worn  Westerners 
came  to  New  York,  "on  an  exploring  expedi- 
tion," as  one  of  them  said.  Here  they  met 
Judge  Elbert  H.  Gary,  whom  they  had 
known  intimately  in  Chicago.  Gary  had 
been  William  Deering's  attorney  for  twenty- 
five  years.  He  was  a  farmer's  son,  and  had 
risen  to  be  the  official  head  of  the  Steel  Trust; 
so  that  he  was  the  one  man  who  had  an 
expert  knowledge  at  once  of  farms,  harvesters, 
and  mergers.  And  naturally,  when  the 
Chicagoans  ran  to  Gary  with  their  tales  of 
woe,  he  brought  them  across  Broadway  into 
the  office  of  J.  P.  Morgan,  which  had  become 
in  1902  a  sort  of  Tribunal  of  Industrial 
Peace. 

There  were  four  of  them  —  Cyrus  H. 
McCormick,  Charles  Deering,  J.  J.  Glessner, 
and  W.  H.  Jones  —  and  all  of  them  added 
to  the  strong  preference  for  competition  a 
definite  opposition  to  trusts,  monopolies, 
and  stock  speculation.  They  were  not  the 
Wall  Street  type  of  millionaire.  In  that 
time  of  booming  optimism,  they  might  have 
made  more  money  in  one  year  by  selling 
stock  than  they  had  made  in  thirty  years  by 
selling  harvesters.     But  no  one  of  them  had 


HAROLD  Mccormick 


J.   J.   CI.KSSXER 


I'hoto  bj  Siuith,  Kvnuatuu,  III. 

W.   H.    lONES 


!'1l  .1  ■  l-jr  iKcr,  Chicago 

JAMI-S   DEHKING 


The  International  Harvester  Company    93 

tried  it.  The  fact  is  that  they  cared  more 
for  the  good-will  of  the  farmers  and  the 
prestige  of  their  machines  than  they  did  for 
larger  profits.  The  thing  that  troubled 
them  most  in  the  proposed  consolidation 
of  properties,  one  of  the  Morgan  partners 
told  me,  was  the  fear  that  prices  would  in 
any  case  have  to  be  raised,  because  of  the 
increasing  cost  of  labour  and  raw  materials. 

No  wonder  that  the  financiers  who  under- 
took to  organise  them  were  driven  almost  to 
distraction  by  their  obstinate  independence. 
They  had  as  many  contradictory  opinions  as 
a  Russian  Duma;  and  it  was  soon  clear  that 
the  only  possible  way  to  proceed  was  to  keep 
them  apart  until  all  possible  preliminaries 
were  arranged. 

So  the  four  Harvester  Men  went  back 
home  until  the  details  of  the  new  combination 
should  be  worked  out.  Then  they  were 
summoned  again  to  New  York.  As  was 
their  custom,  they  went  to  different  hotels, 
and  each  man  was  handled  separately  until 
he  was  in  an  organisable  frame  of  mind. 
This  master-stroke  of  diplomacy  was  ac- 
complished by  George  W.  Perkins  —  Mor- 
gan's   most   versatile    partner;    and    it   gave 


94  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

Perkins  a  day  and  a  night  that  he  will  never 
forget.  From  morning  until  midnight  — 
from  midnight  until  the  first  ray  of  dawn 
slanted  down  Broadway,  Perkins  dashed 
from  hotel  to  hotel  like  a  human  shuttle. 
Deering  conceded  one  point  if  McCormick 
would  concede  another.  Glessner  yielded 
one  of  his  claims,  and  Jones  withdrew  some- 
thing else.  Inch  by  inch  these  stubborn 
men  were  pushed  within  tying  distance  of 
each  other;  and  the  fifty-year  harvester 
war  was  about  to  come  to  an  end. 

The  next  day  Perkins  renewed  the  struggle, 
but  he  was  too  tired  to  continue  the  cab 
driving  between  hotels.  He  telephoned  the 
four  Harvester  Men  to  meet  him  at  Morgan's 
office.  As  each  man  climbed  up  the  rusty 
iron  steps  of  the  Morgan  Building  he  was 
switched  by  the  big  Irish  doorkeeper  into 
one  of  those  large  inner  rooms  at  the  rear, 
on  the  ground  floor,  where  many  a  broken 
business  has  been  mended.  Four  men  in 
four  rooms,  with  Perkins  flying  in  and  out  — 
such  was  the  way  that  the  great  harvester 
company  was  finished.  It  was  a  unique 
situation,  as  much  like  an  incident  in  comic 
opera    as    an   affair   of    business.      But    the 


The  International  Harvester  Company    95 

Morgan  experts  knew  that  if  the  four  men 
were  allowed  to  meet,  the  old  hurtful  rivalries 
would  break  out  afresh  and  the  project 
might  snap  off  like  a  broken  dream. 

To  strengthen  the  new  company  with  a 
big  surplus  of  ready  money,  a  one-sixth 
interest  was  sold  for  twenty  millions  to 
Morgan  and  several  other  New  York  finan- 
ciers  of  the  "old  reliable"  sort.  Also,  a 
fifth  harvester  company,  in  Milwaukee,  was 
bought  from  Stephen  Bull  for  about  five 
millions.  And  when  the  last  rivet  had  been 
clinched  and  the  last  nail  driven  home,  the 
four  Westerners  suddenly  found  them- 
selves sitting  around  the  same  table,  in  the 
new  International  Harvester  Company,  of 
Chicago. 

There  were  several  harvester  companies 
that  remained  independent,  but  probably  not 
from  choice.  I  do  not  know  of  one  that  has 
not,  at  some  stage  of  its  career,  tried  to  get 
into  a  trust.  Fifteen  companies  were  merged 
by  Colonel  Conger  in  1892,  but  they  were 
poorly  fastened  together  and  soon  fell  apart. 
It  is  also  a  fact,  though  one  not  before  made 
public,  that  the  Mutual  Life  Insurance 
Company  tried  to  form  a  second  Harvester 


96  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

Combine  in  1903,  with  four  large  manu- 
facturing companies  in  the  merger,  and 
under  the  presidency  of  E.  D.  Metcalf,  of 
Auburn,  New  York.  When  this  project 
failed,  three  independent  companies  —  two 
in  New  York  and  one  in  Canada,  offered 
themselves  for  sale  to  the  HarvesterCompany. 
It  bought  one  —  the  Osborne  —  for  six 
millions,   and   refused   the  others. 

"We  are  big  enough  now,"  said  Cyrus 
H.  McCormick.  "It  is  not  safe  for  one 
company  to  have  a  monopoly.  What  we 
want  to  do  is  to  regulate  competition,  not  to 
destroy   it." 

Besides  the  big  Osborne  Company,  which 
is  now  the  third  largest  in  the  combine,  the 
Harvester  Company  has  bought  five  smaller 
concerns,  and  built  two  new  plants  —  one  in 
Canada  and  one  in  Sweden.  It  is  like  the 
original  United  States  —  a  union  of  thirteen 
industrial  colonies.  Its  output  has  risen  to 
700,000  harvesting  machines  a  year,  including 
all  varieties;  and  its  annual  revenue  is  more 
than   seventy-three   million   dollars. 

With  its  25,000  employees  and  42,000 
agents,  this  one  company  is  supporting  as 
many  families  as  there  are  in  Utah  or  Mon- 


The  International  Harvester  Company    97 

tana.  A  square  mile  of  land  would  be  too 
small  to  contain  its  factories.  At  its  hundred 
warehouses  there  is  trackage  for  12,000 
cars.  Around  its  workshops  are  six  busy 
railways  of  its  own,  whose  engines  last  year 
pulled  out  65,000  freight-cars,  jammed  full 
of  machinery  for  the  farmers  of  the  world. 

Its  properties  are  so  widespread  that  no 
member  of  the  company  has  seen  them  all. 
To  run  around  their  circle  would  be  a  trip 
of  15,000  miles.  It  owns  20,000  acres  of  coal 
lands  in  Kentucky,  100,000  acres  of  trees  in 
Arkansas,  Mississippi,  and  Missouri,  and 
40,000,000  tons  of  ore  in  the  Wisconsin  and 
Mesaba  Ranges.  It  has  staked  its  money  — 
iS 1 20,0(30,000  —  upon  the  belief  that  for  fifty 
years  longer,  at  least,  the  scientists  will  find 
no   substitute  for  bread. 

The  fact  that  Elbert  H.  Gary,  the  official 
head  of  the  Steel  Trust,  is  one  of  its  directors, 
has  not  prevented  this  self-sufficient  company 
from  owning  a  complete  steel  plant,  where 
2,000  Hungarians  make  iron  from  ore,  and 
steel  from  iron.  It  saws  its  trees  into  lumber 
in  Missouri,  and  roasts  its  coal  into  coke  in 
Kentucky.  Its  domains  are  so  extensive,  in 
fact,  that  if  they  were  contiguous,  they  would 


98  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

make  a  Harvester  City  as  spacious  as  Greater 
Chicago. 

But  the  most  surprising  feature  of  this 
unique  corporation,  to  one  who  sees  it  for 
the  first  time,  is  the  distracting  variety  of 
things  that  pour  out  of  its  factories.  Its 
business  is  by  no  means  to  make  harvesters 
and  nothing  else.  Its  true  character  seems 
to  be  that  of  a  manufacturing  department 
store  for  farmers.  As  a  matter  of  actual 
count,  I  found  in  its  factories  and  ware- 
houses thirty- seven  different  species  of  ma- 
chines, besides  all  manner  of  variations  of 
each  sort. 

Here  you  will  see,  not  only  a  mower  to  cut 
the  grass,  but  a  tedder  (a  kind  of  steel  mule, 
with  an  incurably  bad  temper)  to  kick  and 
scatter  the  new-mown  hay,  so  that  it  will  dry 
in  the  sun;  a  rake  to  gather  it  together;  a 
loader  to  swing  it  on  the  wagon;  and  a  baler 
to  compress  it  into  bundles. 

Here  are  the  self-binders,  not  or  the  grain 
only,  but  for  corn  and  rice  as  well.  For  the 
especial  benefit  of  King  Corn,  whose  tribute 
to  this  Republic  has  lately  swollen  to  twelve 
hundred  millions  a  year,  the  company  is 
making  machines  that  pluck  the  corn  from 


The  International  Harvester  Company    99 

the  stalk  with  iron  hands,  and  others  that 
wrench  off  the  husks,  shell  the  corn,  and 
grind  it  into  several  varieties  of  breakfast 
food  for  the  four-footed  boarders  of  the 
farm. 

Here  is  a  new  machine,  much  less  elegant 
than  useful,  for  flinging  manure  over  a  field. 
Barefooted  women  did  this  work  in  the  old 
brutal  days  of  hand  labour.  But  now, 
thanks  to  the  brain  of  a  canny  Canadian 
farmer,  Joseph  S.  Kemp,  one  worker  can 
feed  the  hungry  fields  without  so  much 
as  soiling  the  tips  of  the  fingers. 

The  farmer's  wife  —  and  there  are 
10,000,000  of  her  in  the  United  States,  has 
been  the  last  one  to  be  considered,  in  this 
outpouring  of  machinery.  But  I  found  at 
Milwaukee  a  rebuilt  factory  belonging  to 
the  International,  where  2,500  men  are 
making  fifty  cream  separators  and  100  gaso- 
lene engines  a  day,  both  designed  to  make 
life  easier  for  Mrs.  Farmer,  as  well  as  for  her 
husband.  Also,  it  will  please  her  to  know 
that  she  may  soon  be  honking  her  way  to 
town  in  an  automobile  buggy,  which  the  big 
corporation  is  making  for  farmers  in  a  new 
factory  in  Akron. 


100  The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

A  harvester  company  must  rollow  the 
whims  of  its  customers,  almost  as  much  as 
though  it  had  newspapers  for  sale.  It  must 
give  10,000,000  farmers  what  they  want. 
At  the  Piano  factory  I  saw  470  different 
varieties  of  wheels;  and  sixty-one  kinds  of 
wooden  tongues  at  McCormick's. 

"  Nothing  could  be  simpler  than  a  tongue," 
said  Maurice  Kane,  the  chief  mechanical 
expert  of  the  International.  "  It  is  a  mere 
pole.  If  we  suited  ourselves,  we  should 
only  make  two  kinds  —  one  for  horses  and 
one  for  oxen.  But  the  farmers  of  the  world 
have  sixty-one  different  ideas  as  to  how  a 
tongue  ought  to  be  made,  and  we  must  give 
them  what  they  ask  for." 

The  last  Minnesota  Legislature,  in  the 
simplicity  of  its  heart,  proposed  to  establish 
a  complete  harvester  plant  for  $200,000. 
It  may  surprise  the  members  of  that 
Legislature  to  know  that  the  International 
has  lately  spent  twice  as  much  merely  to 
improve  one  twine  factory  in  St.  Paul,  and 
four  times  as  much  to  build  one  warehouse 
in  Chicago.  Though  it  began  its  career 
with  sixty  million  dollars'  worth  of  equip- 
ment, it  has  been  forced  by  the  pressure  of 


The  International  Harvester  Company  lOl 

its  trade  to  spend  sixteen  millions  more  on 
its  factories.  And  for  lack  of  a  weather 
prophet,  it  is  obliged  to  carry  over  from  five 
to  six  million  dollars  worth  of  machines 
each  year,  which  remain  unsold  in  different 
countries. 

By  its  very  nature,  this  industry  cannot 
be  carried  on  in  a  small  way.  It  is  as  essenti- 
ally mutual  and  cooperative  as  life  insurance 
or  banking.  If  a  malicious  "green  bug" 
devours  the  wheat  in  Kansas,  the  loss  must 
be  made  up  by  larger  sales  somewhere  else. 
This,  no  doubt,  is  the  main  reason  why  every 
plant  that  was  ever  built  to  supply  a  local 
trade  has  failed. 

No  other  manufacturing  business  carries 
so  many  risks  or  includes  so  many  factors. 
It  is  the  most  comprehensive  industry  in 
the  world.  It  is  the  link  between  the  city 
and  the  farm.  It  is  both  wholesale  and 
retail,  ready-made  and  made  to  order,  local 
and  international.  It  must  make  what  the 
farmer  demands,  and  yet  teach  him  better 
methods.  It  is  at  once  a  factory,  a  bank 
and  a  university. 

Thus,  of  necessity,  the  Harvester  Company 
represents    in    the    highest    degree    the    new 


102        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

American  way  of  manufacturing:  everything 
on  a  large  scale,  elaborate  machinery,  un- 
skilled workmen,  and  a  vast  surplus  to  drive 
it  past  failures  and  misfortunes.  From  its 
ore  mines  in  the  Mesaba  Range,  where  I  saw 
a  steam-shovel  heap  a  fifty  ton  railroad  car 
in  ten  swings,  to  the  lumber  yard  of  the 
McCormick  Works,  where  26,000,000  feet  of 
hardwood  are  seasoning  in  the  sooty  rays  of 
the  Chicago  sun,  it  was  a  panorama  of  big 
production. 

"How  many  castings  did  your  men  make 
last  year  .^"  I  asked  of  the  hustling  Irish- 
American  who  rules  over  one  of  the  McCor- 
mich  foundries. 

"Very  nearly  44,000,000,  sir,"  he  replied. 
"And  the  gray  iron  foundry  over  there  uses 
three  times  as  much  iron  as  we  do,  and  it 
made   more  than    12,000,000." 

Fifty-six  million  castings!  Merely  to 
count  these  would  take  the  whole  Minnesota 
Legislature  sixteen  days,  even  though  every 
member  worked  eight  hours  a  day  and 
counted  sixty  castings  a  minute.  Far,  far 
behind  are  the  simple,  old-fashioned  days, 
when  a  reaping  tool  was  made  of  two  pieces 
—  the    handle    and    the    blade.     There    are 


The  International  Harvester  Company    103 

now  300  parts  in  a  horse-rake,  600  in  a 
mower,  3,800  in  a  binder. 

When  McCormick  built  his  first  hundred 
reapers  in  1845,  he  paid  four  and  a  half  cents 
for  bolts.  That  was  in  the  mythical  age  of 
hand  labour.  To-day  fifty  bolts  are  made 
for  a  cent.  So  with  guard-fingers.  McCor- 
mick paid  twenty-four  cents  each  when 
James  K.  Polk  was  in  the  White  House- 
Now  there  is  a  ferocious  machine,  which, 
with  the  least  possible  assistance  from  one 
man,  cuts  out  1,300  guard-fingers  in  ten 
hours,  at  a  labour-cost  of  six  for  a  cent. 

Also,  while  exploring  one  of  the  Chicago 
factories,  I  came  upon  a  herd  of  cud-chewing 
machines  that  were  crunching  out  chain- 
links  at  the  rate  of  56,000,000  a  year.  Near- 
by were  four  smaller  and  more  irritable 
automata,  which  were  biting  off  pieces  of 
wire  and  chewing  them  into  linchpins  at  a 
speed  of  400,000  bites  a  day. 

"Take  out  your  watch  and  time  this  man," 
said  Superintendent  Brooks  of  the  McCor- 
mick plant.  "See  how  long  he  is  in  boring 
five  holes  in  that  great  casting." 

"Exactly  six  minutes,"  I  answered. 

"Well,  that 's  progress,"  observed  Brooks. 


104        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

"  Before  we  bought  that  machine,  it  was  a 
matter  of  four  hours  to  bore  those  holes." 

In  the  immense  carpenter  shop  he  pointed 
to  another  machine.  "There  is  one  of  the 
reasons,"  he  said,  "why  the  small  factories 
have  been  wiped  out.  That  machine  cost  us 
^2,500.  Its  work  is  to  shape  poles,  and  it 
saves  us  a  penny  a  pole;  that  is  profitable  to 
us  because  we  use  300,000  poles  a  year." 

In  one  of  its  five  twine  mills  —  a  mon- 
strous Bedlam  of  noise  and  fuzz,  which  is  by 
far  the  largest  of  its  sort  in  the  world  — 
there  is  enough  twine  twisted  in  a  single 
day  to  make  a  girdle  around  the  earth. 

In  the  paint  shop  the  man  with  the  brush 
has  been  superseded  —  a  case  of  downright 
trade  suicide.  In  his  place  is  an  unskilled 
Hungarian  with  a  big  tank  of  paint.  Souse! 
Into  the  tank  goes  the  whole  frarn,e  of  a 
binder,  and  the  swarthy  descendant  of 
Attilla  thinks  himself  slow  if  he  dips  less 
than  four  hundred  of  these  in  a  day.  The 
labour-cost  of  painting  wheels  is  now  one-fifth 
of  a  cent  each.  Ten  at  once,  on  a  wooden 
axle,  are  swung  into  the  paint  bath  without 
the  touch  of  a  finger.  And  the  few  belated 
brush-men  who   are  left  work  with   frantic 


The  International  Harvester  Company    105 

haste,  knowing  tliat  they,  too,  are  being 
pursued  by  a  machine  that  will  overtake 
them  some  day. 

In  the  central  bookkeeping  office  of  the 
Harvester  Company  I  found  some  almost 
incredible  statistics.  Here,  for  instance,  are 
a  few  of  the  items  in  last  year's  bill  of  ex- 
penses: 

Two  hundred  and  thirty-five  miles  of 
leather  belting,  940  miles  of  cotton  duck, 
2,000  grindstones,  3,000  shovels,  10,000 
brooms,  1,670,000  buckles,  1,185,000  pounds 
paint,  4,000,000  pounds  wire,  15,000,000 
pounds  nails. 

Merely  to  maintain  its  experimental  depart- 
ment costs  this  imperial  company  ^7,000 
a  week.  Here  are  more  than  two  hun- 
dred inventors  and  designers,  well  housed 
and  well  salaried,  and  not  tramping  from 
shop  to  shop,  as  inventors  did  in  the  good 
old  days.  They  are  paid  to  think;  and  the 
company  is  mightily  proud  of  them.  But 
the  truth  is  that  all  large  corporations  which 
employ  an  army  of  unskilled  workmen  are 
being  compelled  to  offset  so  much  mere 
muscle  by  a  special  department  of  brains. 

There  is,  besides,  a  most  elaborate  system 


lo6        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

of  inspection.  In  the  Deering  factory  I 
saw  a  squad  of  ten  men  who  were  testing  the 
newly  made  binders  with  straw.  "About 
three  out  of  a  hundred  need  fixing,"  said  the 
foreman. 

The  chains  are  tested  by  a  violent  pneu- 
matic machine.  Every  Hnk,  even,  is  branded 
with  a  private  mark  —  A  .  And  in  the 
Hamilton  plant  a  new  scheme  is  being  tried 
—  the  whole  packing  gang  has  become  a 
staff  of  inspection.  Whenever  a  man  finds  a 
hundred  defective  pieces,  he  gets  an  extra 
dollar.  One  sharp-eyed  Scot  in  the  packing- 
room  confided  to  me  that  he  had  made 
"as  high  as  two  shillin's  a  week." 

Such  is  the  scope  of  the  International 
Harvester  Company,  created  in  1902.  As  to 
the  men  who  control  it,  I  have  had  the  greatest 
difficulty  in  penetrating  back  of  the  business 
to  their  personal  characteristics.  For  they 
dislike  the  fierce  light  that  beats  upon  a  rich 
American. 

Of  its  president,  Cyrus  H.  McCormick  the 
Second,  the  first  word  to  be  said  is  that  he  is 
not  built  on  the  same  lines  as  his  belligerent 
father.  He  would  fare  badly,  very  likely,  if 
he  were  in  charge  of  a  catch-as-catch-can 


The  International  Harvester  Company   107 

business,  such  as  the  reaper  trade  was  thirty 
years  ago.  The  making  of  harvesters  is, 
to  him,  half  a  duty  —  to  his  father,  his 
workmen,  and  the  machine  itself  —  and  half 
a  profession  —  not  a  battle  nor  a  game,  as  it 
was  with  the  first  Reaper  Kings.  He  has 
no  desire  to  play  a  lone  hand  in  the  business 
world.  And  his  painstaking  purpose,  as  a 
man  of  affairs,  is  to  secure  less  speculation 
and  more  stability,  less  waste  and  more 
organisation,  less  friction  and  more  com- 
munity of  interest. 

In  all  things  he  is  a  simple  and  serious  man. 
I  have  seen  him  work  from  noon  until  mid- 
night; but  in  my  opinion,  if  he  really  had  his 
choice,  he  would  prefer  a  quiet  homestead,  in 
the  little  tow^n  of  Princeton,  where  he  could 
pursue  a  life  devoted  to  the  interests  of  Prince- 
ton University  and  the  Civic  Federation. 
Even  now,  whenever  he  can  get  free  from  the 
treadmill  of  his  office,  his  greatest  delight  is 
to  escape  to  a  camp  in  the  wild  lands  of 
northern  Michigan,  where  he  can  dress  like 
a  fisherman  and  forget  that  he  is  the  servitor 
of  a  hundred  and  twenty  millions. 

Harold    McCormick,    his    brother,    and    a 
vice-president  of  the  big  company,  is  a  boy- 


lo8         The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

hearted  man  of  thirty-five.  He  has  a  quick- 
action  brain;  but  his  strong  point  is  his 
personal  magnetism  and  Hkableness.  He 
knows  the  harvester  business  throughout* 
having  been  a  shirt-sleeve  workman  in  the 
factory,  an  agent  at  Council  Bluffs,  and  a 
field    expert    in    several    states. 

Most  of  the  stories  told  about  him  illus- 
trate his  naive  boyishness.  For  instance, 
when  he  had  become  an  expert  in  handling 
the  harvester,  an  agent-in-chief  near  Chicago 
telegraphed  for  a  dozen  men.  Only  eleven 
experts  were  available,  so  Harold  volunteered 
to  be  the  twelfth.  He  had  his  working-card 
made  out  in  the  usual  form,  entitling  him  to 
$i8  a  week.  On  Saturday  night,  when  the 
twelve  men  went  to  the  agent-in-chief  for 
their  wages,  he  said,  "I  want  all  of  you  to 
come  in  and  have  a  conference  with  me  to- 
morrow morning  at  ten  o'clock." 

"Sorry  to  say,  Mr.  Blank,"  said  young 
McCormick,  "that  I  can't  be  here  until 
Monday." 

The  agent  stormed.  How  could  anything 
be  more  important  to  a  three-dollar-a-day 
man  than  his  job  .? 

"Well,  if  you  really  must  know  the  reason,'* 


The  International  Harvester  Company   109 

said  the  berated  mechanic,  "1  have  an 
appointment  to  go  to  church  to-morrow 
morning  with   the   Rockefeller  family." 

The  third  brother  —  Stanley  McCormick, 
worked  his  way  up  from  labourer  to  superin- 
tendent of  the  whole  plant.  For  years  he 
rose  at  five  o'clock  every  work-day  morning, 
and  walked  into  the  factory  at  si.x. 

All  three  of  the  McCormicks  show  a 
remarkable  sense  of  obligation,  almost  of 
gratitude,  to  their  employees.  At  the  time 
the  International  was  organised,  Stanley  said 
to   the   others: 

"What  about  the  men?  There  are  some 
of  them  that  deserve  a  share  in  the  new 
company,   as   much   as   we   do." 

So  a  list  of  the  old  employees  was  made, 
from  Charlie  Mulkey,  the  old  watchman,  to 
R.  G.  Brooks,  the  superintendent,  and 
;^ 1, 500,000  was  divided  among  them.  Re- 
cently a  complete  profit-sharing  plan,  such 
as  Perkins  had  worked  out  for  the  Steel 
Trust,  was  put  in  working  order,  and  about 
$200,000  of  extra  money  have  been 
scattered    through    the    pay-envelopes. 

The  two  Deerings,  who  are  now  chairman 
and     vice-president,     were     disciplined     in 


no        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

the    same   stern,  old-fashioned  way  as    the 
McCormicks. 

"Put  this  young  man  to  work  at  the 
bottom  rung  of  the  ladder,"  said  William 
Deering,  when  his  younger  son,  James,  was 
graduated  from  the  university. 

Being  in  many  respects  a  chip  of  the  old 
block,  James  Deering  plunged  into  business 
with  as  much  energy  as  though  he  had  to 
toil  for  his  millions  as  well  as  inherit  them. 
He  became  a  field  expert,  and  followed  the 
harvest  from  Texas  to  North  Dakota.  He 
asked  for  no  favours,  but  sweltered  along 
among  the  Western  farmers  for  several 
summers.  Then  he  went  to  the  foot  of  the 
ladder  in  the  factory  and  wrestled  with  big 
iron  castings  and  steel  frames.  Step  by  step 
he  worked  up,  until  even  his  Spartan  father 
was  satisfied  and  made  him  the  manager 
of  the  whole   plant. 

At  present  there  is  perhaps  no  man  in  the 
harvester  industry  who  has  so  great  a  variety 
of  attainments  as  James  Deering.  He  is  a 
shrewd  commercialist,  yet  he  has  found  time, 
no  one  knows  how,  to  master  several  languages 
and  to  run  the  whole  octave  of  self-culture. 

Charles    Deering,    the    older    of   the    two 


The  International  Harvester  Company   m 

brothers,  had  less  farm  experience,  as  he 
served  for  twelve  years  in  Uncle  Sam's  navy. 
He  was  a  lieutenant  when  he  came  ashore  to 
help  his  father  make  harvesters.  At  that 
time  he  did  much  to  solve  the  binder-twine 
problem  —  how  to  get  better  twine  and 
plenty  of  it.  Then,  when  the  drama  of 
consolidation  was  staged  by  Morgan,  he  took 
a  leading  part.  Personally,  he  is  a  bluff, 
forceful,  but  companionable  man,  such  as 
one  would  expect  to  find  on  the  deck  of  a 
war-ship  rather  than  in  the  telephone- 
pestered  office  of  a  sky-scraper. 

The  two  other  vice-presidents  of  the 
Harvester  Company  are  battle-worn  veterans 
of  the  competitive  period  —  J.  J.  Glessner 
and  William  H.  Jones.  Glessner,  beginning 
as  a  bookkeeper  in  Ohio,  has  for  many  years 
been  regarded  as  a  sort  of  unofficial  peace- 
maker and  balance-wheel  of  the  trade. 
Everybody  confided  in  Glessner.  He  did 
as  much  as  any  one  else  to  harmonise  the 
warring  Harvester  Kings;  but  it  is  also  true 
that  it  was  the  gentle  Glessner  who  developed 
competition  to  the  explosive  point  by  originat- 
ing the  system  of  canvassing.  He  poured 
first  oil  and  then  water  on  the  fire. 


112        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

As  for  William  H.  Jones,  he  is  a  sturdy  and 
genial  Welshman,  who  was  born  and  bred  in 
a  farmhouse.  As  a  boy  he  reaped  wheat 
with  a  sickle  in  the  valleys  of  Wales.  About 
forty  years  ago,  when  he  had  become  an 
American,  he  bought  a  reaper  and  a  tent,  and 
set  out  to  earn  his  fortune.  By  working  twenty 
hours  a  day,  he  had  earned  enough  money, 
by  1 88 1,  to  begin  making  reapers  of  his  own, 
at  Piano;  and  he  built   up   a    large   business. 

The  General  Manager  of  this  big  anti- 
famine  organisation  is  a  young  Illinoisan, 
named  C.  S.  Funk.  "He  is  the  central 
man,"  says  Perkins.  No  other  Chicagoan 
of  his  age  —  he  is  only  thirty-five  —  has 
pushed  up  so  quickly  to  so  high  a  place, 
with  nothing  to  help  him  except  his  own  grit 
and  ability.  To-day  he  manages  a  65,000- 
man-power  corporation;  yet  it  is  very 
little  more  than  twenty  years  since  he  was 
trudging  six  miles  on  a  hot  July  day,  to 
ask  for  his  first  job  in  a  hay-field.  Young 
as  he  was,  he  was  then  the  support  of  a 
widowed  mother,  and  there  were  seven 
children   younger   than    he. 

His  office,  in  which  I  was  permitted  to  take 
notes  for  several  days,  is  a  nerve-centre  of 


The  International  Harvester  Company   113 

the  world.  Everything  that  happens  to  the 
human  race  is  of  interest  to  this  alert  young 
chancellor  of.  the  Harvester  Company.  A 
drought  in  Argentina,  the  green  bug  in 
Kansas,  a  tariff  campaign  in  Australia,  a 
shortage  of  farm  labour  in  Egypt,  a  new 
railway  in  Southern  Russia,  such  are  the 
bulletins  that  guide  him  through  his  day's 
work. 

His  wide-flung  army  is  officered  mainly  by 
farmers'  sons  who  had  a  knack  for  business 
or  for  machinery.  His  assistant,  Alex. 
Legge,  is  an  ex-cowboy  from  Nebraska. 
Before  the  era  of  peace  and  unity  began, 
Funk  and  Legge  had  fought  each  other  in 
twenty   states. 

"Legge  was  one  of  the  best  fighters  I  ever 
knew,"  said  Funk;  "and  I  think  you  might 
put  him  down  as  the  most  popular  man  in  the 
company." 

Maurice  Kane,  the  company's  Chief  Im- 
prover, and  a  fine  type  of  the  Irish-American, 
was  born  on  a  small  farm  near  Limerick.  He 
was  a  farm  hand  in  Wisconsin  when  he  first 
saw  a  harvester,  and  he  has  pulled  himself  up 
every  inch  of  the  way  by  his  own  abilities.  A. 
E.  Mayer,  the  first  of  an  army  of  forty  thou- 


114        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

sand  salesmen,  was  born  on  a  farm  in  New 
York.  He  is  a  sort  of  human  Gatling  gun, 
loaded  with  the  experience  of  his  trade.  B. 
A.  Kennedy,  the  overlord  of  the  thirteen 
factories,  is  a  seasoned  veteran  who  can 
remember  when  he  stood  by  the  forge  of  a 
country  blacksmith  shop  and  hammered  out 
ploughs  by  hand.  Only  one  of  the  company's 
aenerals,  H.  F.  Perkins,  began  life  with  such 
a  luxury  as  a  university  education.  He  is  in 
charge  of  the  raw  materials  —  the  coal  and 
iron  and  lumber  and  sisal  and  flax. 

These  are  a  few  of  the  men  who  manage 
this  international  empire  of  bread-machinery. 
They  are  all  practical  men,  hard  workers, 
close  to  the  farm  and  the  farmer.  They  are 
not  fashionable  idlers,  nor  promoters,  nor 
Wall  Street  speculators.  And  they  have  no 
more  use  for  tickers  than  for  telescopes  —  a 
fact  which  is  vitally  important,  now  that 
they  are  making  more  than  half  the  harvesters 
of  the   world. 

Such  is  the  International  Harvester  Com- 
pany from  the  inside.  But  an  outside  view 
is  equally  necessary.  It  is  of  tremendous 
interest  to  10,000,000  American  farmers  to 
know  the  habits  and  the  disposition  of  this 


The  International  Harvester  Company    115 

powerful  organisation.  As  Theodore  Roose- 
velt has  said,  there  are  good  combinations 
and  bad  ones.  Which  is  the  International 
Harvester   Company  .'' 

In  order  to  get  the  facts  about  it  at  first 
hand,  I  interviewed  the  four  chief  competitors 
of  the  Harvester  Company,  three  Attorneys- 
General,  seven  editors  of  farm  papers,  four 
professors  of  agricultural  colleges,  seven  or 
eight  implement  agents,  thirty  farmers  in 
Iowa,  Minnesota,  and  Wisconsin,  two  state 
governors,  and  the  Federal  Bureau  of  Cor- 
porations. Before  I  had  gone  far,  I  learned 
that  the  big  Harvester  Company  has  been 
beset  by  a  host  of  new  troubles. 

It  is  an  evidence  of  the  eternal  futility  of 
human  ambition,  that  when  a  group  of 
warring  Harvester  Kings  had  made  peace 
with  one  another,  when  they  had  healed 
their  wounded  and  buried  their  dead,  and 
sat  down  to  enjoy  a  future  of  prosperous 
tranquillity,  up  sprang  a  host  of  new  enemies, 
armed  and  double-armed  with  weapons 
from  which  there  seemed  to  be  no  sort  of 
defence.  Their  outposts  were  shattered  by 
legislative  dynamite.  Tariff  walls  were  built 
across  their  paths.     And  half  a  dozen  giant 


Ii6        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

ogres,  otherwise  known  as  Attorneys-General, 
crashed  into  their  peaceful  business  with 
destructive   clubs   of  law. 

The  bigger  the  organisation  the  more  trou- 
ble to  protect  and  preserve  it.  This  is  what 
Abraham  Lincoln  learned  —  what  the  whole 
United  States  learned,  half  a  century  ago;  and 
it  is  the  lesson  that  the  harvester-makers  are 
studying  to-day.  It  is  a  new  phase  of  an 
old  fact;  it  is  the  Tragedy  of  the  Trust. 

Some  foreign  nations,  too,  have  taken 
their  cue  from  American  Legislatures,  and 
have  become  almost  as  hostile  to  the  Chicago 
company  as  though  it  were  exporting  rou- 
lette wheels  and  burglars'  jimmies.  France 
taxed  half  a  million  from  it  last  year  by  a 
penalising  tariff.  Australia  has  made  it  a 
political  issue.  Germany  takes  a  toll  of  ^ii 
on  every  self-binder,  and  Austria  takes  $2$. 
Roumania  raised  the  duty  on  harvesters 
several  months  ago;  and  there  is  a  general 
feeling  that  the  time  has  come  to  check  the 
supremacy  that  the  United  States  has  always 
had  in  this  line. 

Yet  the  fact  that  the  Harvester  Company 
has  been  fined  in  two  states  does  not  mean 
that  it  has  taken  advantage  of  its  size  to 


The  International  Harvester  Company   117 

become  a  lawbreaker.  The  "crime"  of 
which  it  was  declared  guilty,  was  the  main- 
tenance of  the  old  practice  of  "exclusive 
contracts,"  which  has  been  the  almost 
universal  custom  for  fifty  years.  Each  agent 
was  pledged  not  to  sell  any  other  company's 
goods.  The  International  abolished  this  re- 
quirement tivo  years  ago,  and  several  of  the 
independent  companies  still  retain  it.  Until 
the  merger  was  organised  it  was  regarded  as 
fair  enough.  It  is  one  of  the  most  usual 
habits  of  agency  business.  But  the  American 
people  are  now  demanding  that  a  big  com- 
pany shall  be  much  more  "square"  and 
moral  than  a  small  capitalist  who  is  fighting 
for  his  life. 

Many  of  the  old  methods  of  the  rough-and- 
tumble  days  have  survived.  It  is  not  possi- 
ble to  say  "Presto,  change!"  to  40,000 
battling  agents,  so  that  they  shall  at  once 
begin  to  play  fair  and  cooperate.  But  the 
general  opinion  is  that  the  Combine  has 
raised  the  harvester  business  to  a  higher 
level.  At  one  of  its  branch  offices  I  came 
accidentally  upon  a  letter  written  by  Cyrus 
H.  McCormick,  in  which  he  forbade  the 
taking  of  rebates  from  railways. 


Ii8         The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

"You  must  clearly  understand,"  he  wrote, 
"that  this  company  will  maintain  a  policy  of 
absolute  obedience  to  the  law." 

Among  the  farmers  of  Iowa  and  Kansas  I 
found  no  definite  charges  against  the  har- 
vester combine  —  nothing  but  that  vague 
dread  of  bigness  which  seems  natural  to  the 
average  mind,  and  which  even  the  great- 
brained  Webster  had  when  he  opposed  the 
annexation  of  Texas  and  California.  Of 
four  farm  editors,  one  was  against  all  "  trusts  " 
on  general  principles;  and  the  other  three 
believed  that  the  -evils  of  harvester  competi- 
tion were  much  greater  than  those  of  consoli- 
dation. The  bare  fact  that  this  one  cor- 
poration has  ^120,000,000  of  capital  alarms 
the  old-timers.  Others  have  become  more 
accustomed  to  the  Big  Facts  of  American 
business. 

"Why,"  said  one  implement  dealer,  "after 
all,  $120,000,000  is  less  than  the  American 
farmers  earn  in  a  vv^eek." 

He  might  also  have  said  that  it  was  less 
than  the  value  of  one  corn  crop  in  Iowa,  or 
half  as  much  as  the  Iowa  farmers  have  now 
on  deposit  in  their  savings  banks.  It  is 
very  little  more  than  Russell  Sage  raked  in 


The  International  Harvester  Company  119 

through  the  wickets  of  his  httle  money- 
lending  office,  or  than  Marshall  Field  ac- 
cumulated from  a  single  store.  In  fact,  if 
bread  were  raised  one  cent  a  loaf  for  one 
year  in  the  United  States  alone,  the  extra 
pennies  would  buy  out  the  whole  "Harvester 
Trust,"  bag  and   baggage. 

The  bulk  of  the  farmers,  so  far  as  I  could 
harmonise  their  opinions,  are  now  too  well 
accustomed  to  big  enterprises  among  them- 
selves to  be  scared  by  the  Chicago  merger. 
They  have  at  the  present  time  more  than  five 
thousand  cooperative  companies  of  their  own. 
And  some  of  these  are  of  national  importance; 
as,  for  instance,  the  powerful  Cotton  Grow- 
ers' Trust,  and  the  Farmers'  Business  Con- 
gress, which  owns  800  elevators  for  the 
storage  of  grain. 

"My  only  objection  to  the  International 
Harvester  Company,"  said  a  business  man  in 
St.  Paul,  "is  that  it  sells  its  machinery 
cheaper  in  Europe  than  it  does  in  the  United 
States."  I  investigated  this  charge,  and 
found  it  wholly  incorrect.  The  greater 
expense  and  risk  of  foreign  trade  compels 
the  manufacturers  to  ask  almost  as  high 
prices    as    American    farmers    had    to    pay 


120        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

twenty  years  ago.  But  there  is  a  quite 
credible  reason  for  this  rumour.  It  is  simply 
this  —  that  for  some  less  progressive  countries 
a  crude,  old-fashioned  reaper  is  being  made, 
to  sell  for  ^45.  The  modern,  self-rake 
reaper  is  too  complex  for  the  simple  mind  of 
many  a  Russian  farmer,  so  he  is  supplied 
with  a  clumsy  machine  which  is  ^15  cheaper, 
but  which  looked,  to  my  unsl'illed  eye,  more 
than  $30  worse. 

No  one  accuses  the  "Trust"  of  having 
unreasonably  raised  prices.  On  the  con- 
trary, it  is  generally  given  full  credit  for 
holding  prices  down,  in  spite  of  the  fact 
that  it  is  paying  from  twenty  to  eighty  per 
cent,  more  for  its  labour  and  raw  materials 
than  was  paid  in  1902.  Generally  speaking, 
all  farm  implements  except  thrashing-ma- 
chines are  cheaper  now  than  they  were  in  1880, 
when  the  competition  was  most  strenuous. 
Binders  have  dropped  from  ^325  to  ^125; 
hay-rakes  from  $25  to  $16;  and  mowers  from 
$80  to  ^45. 

"  I  paid  ^200  for  a  self-binding  harvester 
twenty-five  years  ago,"  said  a  Kansas  farmer. 
"Ten  years  later  I  bought  another  for  ^140 
and  in  1907  I  bought  one  from  the  Inter- 


The  International  Harvester  Company    121 

national  for  ;$I25,  which  is  in  my  judgment 
the  best  of  the  three  machines." 

The  International  has  competitors,  too — 
very  active  and  able  ones.  Binders  are  made 
by  4  large  independent  companies,  mowers 
by  17,  corn-shredders  by  18,  twine  by  26, 
wagons  by  116,  and  gasolene  engines  by  124. 
Of  the  thirty-seven  different  machines  made  by 
the  International  there  are  only  three — hemp- 
reapers,  corn-shockers,  and  rice-binders — that 
are  made  by  no  other  company,  and  even  these 
machines  are  not  protected  by  any  basic 
patents.  Povv'erful  as  the  International  is,  it 
is  still  far  from  the  place  where  business  is 
one  long  sweet  dream  of  monopoly. 

The  four  independent  companies  that 
make  binders  seem  to  have  no  fear  of  the 
"Trust."  "We  have  no  fault  to  find  with 
it,"  said  President  Atwater,  of  the  Johnson 
Company.  "We  don't  want  it  smashed. 
Why  ?  Because  our  business  has  doubled 
since  it  was  organised;  and  because  we 
would  sooner  compete  with  one  company 
than  with  a  dozen." 

"The  'Trust'  was  the  only  thing  that 
saved  the  whole  harvester  business  from 
annihilation,"   said   the   ex-president  of  an- 


122         The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

other  independent  company,  when  I  pressed 
him  for  his  personal  opinion,  and  promised 
not  to  use  his  name.  "The  cold  fact  is 
really  this,"  he  added,  "that  the  International 
Harvester  Company  has  bettered  conditions 
for  the  farmer,  for  the  independent  com- 
panies,  and   for  everybody   but   itself." 

"The  big  combine  has  never  misused  its 
power,"  said  a  third  of  the  International's 
competitors.  "  Now  and  then  its  agents 
make  trouble,  just  as  ours  do,  no  doubt. 
But  the  men  at  the  top  have  always  given  us 
a  square  deal." 

So  it  is  my  duty  to  state  that  on  the 
whole  the  Harvester  Combine  is  a  good 
combination  and  not  a  bad  one.  I  have 
found  it  radically  different  from  the  get-rich- 
quick  trusts  that  have  been  described  in 
recent  books  and  magazine  articles.  It  is 
not  a  monopoly.  It  is  an  advocate  of  free 
trade.  Its  stock  is  not  watered,  nor  for 
sale  in  Wall  Street.  And  the  men  at  the  top 
are  very  evidently  plain,  hard-working, 
simple-living  American  citizens,  who  are 
quite  content  to  do  business  in  a  live-and-let- 
live  way. 

They  are  not  thoroughly  reconciled,  even 


The  International  Harvester  Company   1 23 

yet,  to  being  a  merger.  They  look  back 
with  open  regret  to  the  wasteful  but  adven- 
turous days  of  competition.  Of  the  com- 
bination the  elder  Mrs.  Cyrus  McCormick 
finely  said: 

"It  was  a  hurt  of  the  heart.  Each  of  our 
companies  was  like  a  family.  Each  had  a 
body  of  loyal  agents,  who  had  been  comrades 
through  many  struggles.  But  the  terrible 
increase  in  expenses  compelled  us  to  subdue 
our  feelings  and  to  cooperate  with  one 
another." 

"I  am  not  a  merger  man  myself,"  said 
William  Deering,  "although  I  believe  that 
the  International  Harvester  Company  has 
been   a   benefit  to  the  farmers." 

Cyrus  H.  McCormick  goes  still  further. 
He  is  a  "trust-buster"  himself,  so  far  as  the 
over-capitalised  and  oppressive  leviathans  of 
business  are  concerned.  He  said  to  me 
frankly:  "Some  of  the  hostility  to  our 
company  is  inspired  by  worthy  motives, 
growing  out  of  the  general  opposition  to  the 
so-called  trusts."  And  when  a  North  Dakota 
congressman  proposed  in  1904  that  the 
International  Harvester  Company  should  be 
investigated,     Cyrus     McCormick    at    once 


124        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

sent  a  message  that  amazed  the  Bureau  of 
Corporations  —  "  Please  come  and  investi- 
gate us,"  he  said.  "If  we  're  not  right,  we 
want  to   get   right." 

"Yes,"  said  one  of  the  highest  officials  of 
the  Roosevelt  administration,  when  I  asked 
him  to  corroborate  this  very  remarkable 
story.  "It  is  true  that  from  1904  it  has  been 
the  continued  desire  of  the  International 
Harvester  Company  that  we  should  investi- 
gate them.  In  fact,  during  the  last  year 
(1907)  they  have  urged  us  with  considerable 
earnestness  to  make  this  investigation." 

So,  this  big  business  has  evolved  from 
simple  to  complex  in  accordance  with  the 
same  laws  that  rule  plants  and  empires. 
It  has  probably  not  yet  reached  its  full 
maturity,  for  it  is  greater  than  any  man  or 
any  form  of  organisation,  and  the  tiny 
ephemeral  atoms  who  control  it  to-day  are  no 
more  than  its  most  obedient  retinue.  They 
come  and  go  —  quarrel  and  make  friends  — 
live  and  die.  What  matter  ?  The  big  busi- 
ness, once  alive,  grows  on  through  the  short 
centuries,  from  generation  to  generation. 

And  what  does  it  all  mean  —  this  federa- 
tion of  thirteen  factory  cities  —  this  coordina- 


The  International  Harvester  Company   125 

tion  of  muscle  and  mind  and  millions  — 
this  arduous  development  of  a  new  art, 
whereby  a  group  of  mechanics  can  take  a 
wagon-load  of  iron  ore  and  a  tree,  and 
fashion  them  into  a  shapely  automaton  that 
has  the  power  of  a  dozen  farmers  ? 

//  means  bread.  It  means  Jiunger-insur- 
ance  for  the  whole  human  race.  As  we  shall 
see  in  the  next  chapter,  it  jneans  that  the 
famine  problem  has  been  solved ,  not  only  for 
the  United  States,  but  for  all  the  civilised 
nations  of  the  world. 


CHAPTER  IV 
The  American  Harvester  Abroad 

THE  first  American  reapers  that  went 
to  Europe  were  given  a  royal  welcome. 
There  were  two  of  them  —  one  made  by 
McCormick  and  one  made  by  Hussey,  and 
they  were  exhibited  before  Albert  Edward, 
the  Prince  Consort  of  England,  at  a  World's 
Fair  in  London  in   1851. 

There  had  been  reapers  invented  in 
England  before  this  date,  but  none  of  them 
would  reap.  All  the  inventors  were  mere 
theorists.  They  designed  their  reapers  for 
ideal  grain  in  ideal  fields.  One  of  them 
was  a  preacher,  the  Rev.  Patrick  Bell; 
another,  Henry  Ogle,  was  a  school-teacher. 
James  Dobbs,  an  actor,  invented  a  machine 
that  cut  artificial  grain  on  the  stage.  And  a 
machinist  named  Gladstone  made  a  reaper 
that  also  worked  well  until  he  tried  it  on  real 
grain  in  a   real   field. 

But  the  exhibition  of  the  American  reaper 
126 


The  American  Harvester  Abroad     12/ 

in  London  did  not  result  in  its  immediate 
adoption.  There  was  little  demand  for 
harvesters  in  England  fifty  years  ago;  and  in 
other  European  countries  there  was  none  at 
all.  Farm  labour  was  cheap — forty  cents 
a  day  in  England  and  five  cents  a  day  in 
Russia;  and  the  rush  of  labourers  into 
factory  cities  had  not  yet  begun. 

In  the  years  following  1851,  the  American 
reaper  did,  however,  become  popular  among 
the  very  rich.  It  became  the  toy  of  kings 
and  titled  landowners.  By  1864  Europe  was 
buying  our  farm  machinery  to  the  extent  of 
$600,000.  This  was  less  than  she  buys  to-day 
in  a  week;  but  it  was  a  beginning.  Several 
foreign  manufacturers  began  at  this  time  to 
make  reapers,  notably  in  Toronto,  Sheffield, 
Paris,  and  Hamburg.  This  competition 
spurred  on  the  American  reaper  agents,  who 
were  already  taking  advantage  of  the  interest 
shown  by  royalty  in  the  American  reaper.  And 
from  the  close  of  the  Civil  War  on,  there  was 
an  exciting  race,  generally  neck  and  neck, 
between  Cyrus  H.  McCormick,  Sr.,  and 
Walter  A.  Wood,  to  see  who  could  vanquish 
the  most  of  these  foreign  imitators,  and  bag 
the  greatest  number  of  kings  and  nobilities. 


128         The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

It  was  a  contest  that  not  only  resulted  in 
the  triumph  of  the  American  reaper,  but  also 
brought  the  Reaper  Kings  recognition  and 
reputation  abroad.  In  1867  both  McCor- 
mick  and  Wood  were  decorated  with  the 
Cross  of  the  Legion  of  Honour  by  Napoleon 
III.;  and  later  they  stood  side  by  side  to 
receive  the  Imperial  Cross  from  the  hand  of 
the  Austrian  emperor.  Hundreds  of  medals 
and  honours  were  showered  upon  these  two 
inventor  mechanics;  and  the  French  Academy 
of  Science,  in  a  blaze  of  Gallic  enthusiasm, 
elected  McCormick  one  of  its  members, 
because  he  had  "done  more  for  the  cause  of 
agriculture   than   any  other  living  man." 

Many  and  strange  were  the  exploits  of  the 
American  Reaper  Kings  at  the  courts  and 
royal  farms  of  the  real  kings.  Unable  to 
speak  any  language  but  their  own,  unused 
to  pomp  and  pageantry,  breezily  independent 
in  the  American  fashion,  the  Reaper  Kings 
plunged  from  adventure  to  adventure,  abso- 
lutely indifferent  to  everything  but  their 
reapers  and  success. 

"There  is  to  be  a  trial  of  reapers  at  Rome 
next  June,"  wrote  David  M.  Osborne,  a  New 
Yorker    who    began    to    export    reapers    to 


The  American  Harvester  Abroad     129 

Europe  in  1862.  **  Think  of  invading  the 
sacred  precincts  of  that  ancient  place  with 
Yankee  harvesters.  We  will  wake  up  the 
dry  bones  of  these  old  countries,  and  civilise 
and  Christianise  them  with  our  farm  ma- 
chinery." 

C.  W.  Marsh,  inventor  of  the  Marsh 
Harvester,  made  a  sensational  debut  in 
Hungary  in  1870.  Several  grand  dukes  had 
arranged  for  a  great  contest  of  the  various 
sorts  of  reapers  on  one  of  the  royal  farms 
in  Hungary,  so  that  the  Minister  of  Agri- 
culture might  take  notice.  When  the  day 
arrived,  there  were  nine  reapers  at  the  farm, 
mostly   of   European    design. 

Marsh's  strange-looking  machine  seemed 
to  be  a  combination  of  reaper  and  work- 
bench. But  ten  minutes  after  the  contest 
began,  Marsh  had  the  race  won.  His 
machine  was  a  new  type,  the  forerunner  of 
the  modern  self-binder.  It  was  so  made 
that  two  men  could  stand  upon  it  and  bind 
the  grain  as  fast  as  it  was  cut.  But  en  this 
occasion  Marsh  could  hire  no  farmer  to  help 
him  and  was  obliged  to  do  the  work  alone. 
The  judges  were  stunned  with  amazement, 
therefore,  when  they  found  that  he  had  bound 


130        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

three-quarters  of  an  acre  in  twenty-eight 
minutes.  Here  was  a  man  who  could  do  in 
half  an  hour  what  few  Hungarian  peasants 
could  finish  in  less  than  a  day! 

" He  is  an  athlete,"  said  one.  "A  wizard," 
said  another. 

Before  they  could  recover  from  their 
astonishment,  Marsh  had  stored  his  harvester, 
pocketed  the  prize  of  forty  golden  ducats, 
and  hurried  away  to  his  hotel,  eager  for  a 
bath  and  a  chance  to  pick  the  thistles  out  of 
his  hands. 

But  the  grand  dukes  and  miscellaneous 
dignitaries  were  not  to  be  escaped  so  easily. 
An  officer  in  gorgeous  uniform  was  sent  to 
find  Marsh  and  bring  him  forthwith  to  the 
main  dining-hall  of  the  city.  Here  a  ban- 
quet was  prepared,  and  a  throng  of  high 
personages  sat  down,  with  Marsh  at  the 
head  of  the  table,  cursing  his  luck  and 
nursing   his    sore    fingers. 

At  the  close  of  the  banquet,  amid  great 
applause,  a  medal  was  pinned  upon  his  coat, 
and  the  whole  assemblage  hushed  to  hear 
his  reply.  Now  Marsh,  like  two-thirds  of 
the  Reaper  Kings,  could  no  more  make  a 
speech    than    walk    a    rope.     On    only    one 


The  American  Harvester  Abroad    131 

previous  occasion  had  he  faced  an  audience, 
and  that  was  at  the  age  of  twelve,  when  he 
had  recited  a  scrap  from  the  **Lay  of  the 
Last  Minstrel"  at  a  school  entertainment. 
As  he  rose  to  his  feet,  this  poetic  fragment 
came  into  his  mind;  and  so,  half  in  fun  and 
half  in  desperation.  Marsh  assumed  the  pose 
of  a  Demosthenes  and  addressed  the  ban- 
queters as  follows: 

*'  O  Caledonia  !     Stern  and  wild, 
eet  nurse  for  a  poetic  child! 
Land  of  brown  heath  and  shaggy  wood, 
Land  of  the  mountain  and  the  flood, 
Land  of  my  sires!     What  mortal  hand 
Can  e'er  untie  the  filial  band 
That  knits  me  to  thy  rugged  strand!" 

*'That  was  the  first  and  only  speech  of  my 
life,"  said  Mr.  Marsh,  when  I  saw  him  in  his 
home  as  DeKalb,  where  he  has  retired  from 
business.  "But  it  certainly  established  my 
reputation  as  an  orator  in  that  region  of 
Hungary." 

At  one  famous  competition  near  Paris,  in 
1879,  three  reapers  were  set  to  work  in  fields 
of  equal  size.  The  French  reaper  led  off 
and  finished  in  seventy-two  minutes.  The 
English  reaper  followed  and  lumbered  through 


132         The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

in  sixty-six  minutes.  Then  came  the  Ameri- 
can machine,  and  when  it  swept  down  its 
stretch  of  grain  in  twenty-two  minutes,  the 
judges  were  incHned  to  doubt  either  their 
watches   or   their   eyesight. 

Another  of  these  tournaments,  which  also 
did  much  to  advertise  the  United  States  as 
the  only  genuine  and  original  reaper  country, 
took  place  on  an  English  estate  in  1880. 
There  was  only  one  American  reaper  in  the 
race,  and  in  appearance  it  was  the  clown  of 
the  circus.  The  ship  that  carried  it  had  been 
wrecked  on  the  Irish  coast,  so  that  when  it 
arrived  the  machine  was  rusted  and  dingy. 

Cyrus  H.  McCormick,  Jr.,  had  it  in  charge. 
He  was  then  a  youth  of  twenty-one,  and 
equally  ready  for  an  adventure  or  a  sale. 
There  was  no  time  to  repaint  and  polish  the 
machine,  so  he  resolved  to  convert  its  forlorn 
appearance    into   an    asset. 

"Oil  her  up  so  she  '11  run  like  a  watch,'* 
he  said  to  his  experts.  "But  don't  improve 
her  looks.  If  you  find  any  paint,  scrape  it 
off.  And  go  and  hire  the  smallest,  scrub- 
biest, toughest  pair  of  horses  you  can  find.'* 

The  next  day  five  or  six  foreign  reapers 
were  on  hand,  each  glittering  with  newness 


The  American  Harvester  Abroad     133 

and  drawn  by  a  stately  team  of  big  Norman 
horses.  The  shabby  American  reaper  ar- 
rived last,  and  met  a  shout  of  ridicule  as  it 
rolled  into  its  place.  But  in  the  race,  "Old 
Rusty,"  as  the  spectators  called  it,  swept 
ahead  of  the  others  as  though  it  were  an 
enchanted  chariot,  winning  the  gold  medal 
and  an  enviable  prestige  among  British 
farmers. 

In  Germany,  as  in  England,  the  reaper  was 
introduced  into  general  use  through  royalty. 
This  was  in  1871,  when  a  New  York  Reaper 
King  named  Byron  E.  Huntley  gave  the 
German  emperor  and  empress  their  first 
view  of  harvesting  on  the  American  plan. 
The  exhibition  took  place  in  a  grain-field 
that  lay  near  the  royal  residence  at  Potsdam. 
At  first,  the  empress  watched  the  machine 
from  a  window;  but  soon  she  became  so 
keenly  interested  that  she  went  into  the  field 
to  study  it  at  closer  range. 

"I  admire  you  Americans,"  she  said  to  the 
delighted  Huntley.  "You  are  so  deft  —  so 
ingenious,  to  make  a  machine  like  this." 

The  present  Emperor  of  Germany  is  not 
merely  interested  in  American  harvesters; 
he  is  an  enthusiast.     On  several  occasions 


134        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

he  has  held  harvester  matinees  for  the 
benefit  of  his  cabinet  ministers,  so  that  they 
could  see  with  their  own  eyes  the  superiority 
of  machinery  to  hand-labour.  The  first  of 
these  matinees  was  given  on  one  of  the 
Kaiser's  farms,  near  the  ancient  city  of  Bonn, 
in  1896;  and  I  was  told  the  story  by  Sam 
Dennis,  the  Illinois  Irishman  who  was  in 
charge  of  the  harvester. 

Dennis  arranged  a  contest  between  his  one 
machine  and  forty  Polish  women  who  cut 
the  crain  with  old-fashioned  sickles.  As 
soon  as  the  emperor  and  his  retinue  had 
arrived,  all  on  horseback,  a  signal  was  given 
and  the  strange  race  began.  On  one  side 
of  the  field  were  the  forty  women,  bent  and 
browned  by  many  a  day's  toil  under  the  hot 
sun.  On  the  other  side  was  Sam  Dennis, 
sitting  on  his  showy  harvester. 

"Get  ap!"  said  Dennis  to  the  big  German 
horses,  and  the  grain  fell  in  a  wide  swath 
over  the  clicking  knife,  swept  upward  on  the 
canvas  elevator  into  the  swift  steel  arms  and 
fingers,  and  was  flung  to  the  ground  in  a 
fusillade  of  sheaves,  each  bound  tightly  with 
a   knotted   string. 

The    emperor   was    radiant   with    delight. 


The  American  Harvester  Abroad    137 

him  a  bound  sheaf,  so  that  he  could  see  a 
knot  that  had  been  tied  by  the  machine. 
The  old  man  studied  it  for  some  time.  Then 
he  asked  me  —  'Can  these  machines  be 
made  in  Germany  ?' 

"'No,  your  Excellency,'  I  said.  'They 
can   be   made  only  in  America.' 

"'Well,'  said  Bismarck,  speaking  very 
good  English,  'you  Yankees  are  ingenious 
fellows.     This  is  a  wonderful  machine.'" 

When  Loubet  was  President  of  France, 
he  and  Seth  Low,  of  New  York,  were  walk- 
ing together  over  the  President's  estate. 
Loubet  pointed  to  a  reaper  which  was  being 
driven  through  a  yellow  wheat-field. 

"Do  you  see  that  machine  ?"  he  remarked. 
"I  bought  it  from  an  American  company  in 
1870,  and  I  have  used  it  in  every  harvest 
since  that  time.  I  have  four  of  those  ma- 
chines now,  and  I  want  to  say  to  you  that  they 
are  the  most  useful  articles  that  come  to  us 
from  the  United  States.  I  am  stating  no 
more  than  the  simple  truth  when  I  tell  you 
that  without  American  harvesters,  France 
would  starve." 

In  still  other  countries  the  American 
reaper    has    been    popular    with    kings    and 


138        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

potentates.  The  Sultan  of  Turkey  and  the 
Shah  of  Persia  each  bought  one  during  the 
Chicago  World's  Fair.  And  the  young  King 
of  Spain,  who  ordered  a  mower  in  1903, 
narrowly  escaped  being  minced  up  by  its 
knives.  Being  an  impulsive  youth,  he  gave 
a  cry  of  joy  at  sight  of  the  handsome  machine, 
sprang  upon  the  seat,  and  lashed  the  horses 
without  first  laying  hold  of  the  reins.  The 
horses  leaped,  and  the  seventeen-year-old 
Alphonso  went  sprawling.  Twenty  work- 
men ran  to  his  help,  and  one  level-headed 
American  mechanic  caught  the  reins;  so 
the  worst  penalty  that  the  boy  king  had  to 
pay  for  his  recklessness  was  a  tumble  and  a 
bad  scare. 

In  Russia,  the  Czar  and  the  grand  dukes 
at  first  bought  reapers  partly  as  toys  and 
partly  as  strike-breakers.  If  the  labourers 
on  their  estates  demanded  more  pay  than 
fifty  cents  a  week,  the  manager  would  drive 
them  in  a  body  to  his  barn,  then  throw  open 
the  doors  and  show  them  five  or  six  red 
harvesters. 

"Do  you  see  those  American  machines?" 
he  would  say.  **  Unless  you  go  back  to 
work  at  the  same  wages,  I  will  reap  the  grain 


i   =i 


The  American  Harvester  Abroad    I39 

with  these  machines,  and  you  will  have  no 
work  at  all,  and  no  money."  A  look  at 
these  machine-devils  has  usually  sent  the 
cowed  serfs  back  to  their  sickles.  But 
here  and  there  it  has  set  them  to  wondering 
whether  or  not  a  fifty-cent-a-week  job  was 
worth  having,  and  so  has  given  them  an 
ABC  lesson  in  American  doctrines. 

Many  of  the  Russian  nobility,  too,  have 
begun  to  learn  a  trifle  about  democracy 
from  the  American  harvester  agents.  There 
is  a  certain  young  baron,  for  example, 
whose  estate  is  not  far  from  Riga.  Last 
year,  to  be  in  fashion,  he  bought  a  Chicago 
self-binder.  When  it  arrived,  there  came 
with  it,  as  usual,  an  expert  mechanic  to  set 
it  up  and  start  it  in  the  field.  In  this  case, 
the  mechanic  was  a  big  German-American 
named  Lutfring,  born  in  Wisconsin,  of 
"Forty  Eighter"  stock. 

The  baron  was  evidently  impressed  by  the 
manly  and  dignified  bearing  of  Lutfring,  who 
stood  erect  while  the  native  workmen  were 
bowing  and  cringing  in  obeisance.  And 
when  Lutfring  said  to  him,  "Now,  Baron 
Hahn,  we  are  all  barons  in  my  country,  but 
you  '11  pardon  me  if  I  do  this  work  in  my 


140        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

shirt-sleeves,"  the  baron  was  so  taken  by 
surprise  that  he  offered  to  hold  Lutfring's 
coat.  Half  an  hour  later  he  was  at  v/ork 
himself,  doing  physical  labour  for  the  first 
time  in  his  life.  And  when  the  harvester 
had  been  well  launched  upon  its  sea  of  yellow 
grain,  he  took  Lutfring  —  the  baron  from 
Wisconsin  —  to  dinner  with  him  in  the 
castle,  and  spent  the  greater  part  of  the 
afternoon  showing  him  the  family  portraits. 

From  such  beginnings  the  harvester  has 
advanced,  to  make  in  Russia  the  greatest 
conquests  it  has  achieved  anywhere.  More 
business  is  now  being  done  in  the  land  of  the 
Czar  than  was  done  with  the  whole  world 
in  1885.  One  recent  shipment,  so  large  as  to 
break  all  records,  was  carried  from  Chicago 
to  New  York  on  3,000  freight-cars,  and 
transferred  to  a  chartered  fleet  of  nine  steam- 
ships, $5,000,000  worth  of  hunger-insurance. 

During  the  Russo-Japanese  War  a  striking 
incident  occurred  that  showed  the  respect 
of  the  government  for  American  harvesters. 
Several  troop-trains  that  were  on  their  way  to 
the  front  were  suddenly  side-tracked,  to 
make  way  for  a  long  freight  train,  loaded 
with   heavy   boxes.     The  war  generals   and 


The  American  Harvester  Abroad    I4I 

grand  dukes  in  charge  of  the  troops  were 
furious.  Why  should  their  trains  be  pushed 
to  one  side  and  delayed,  to  expedite  a  mere 
consignment  of  freight  ?  They  telegraphed 
their  indignation  to  St.  Petersburg,  and 
received  a  reply  from  Count  Witte.  "The 
freight  train  must  pass,"  he  said.  "It  is 
loaded  with  American  harvesters.  //  means 
hread.^* 

As  a  result  of  this  attitude,  there  are  now 
some  provinces  in  southern  Russia  where  not 
even  Secretary  of  Agriculture  James  Wilson 
would  find  much  fault  with  the  farming.  I 
have  secured  the  figures  for  the  Province  of 
Kuban,  in  the  Caucasus.  Here  there  are 
3,500  thrashing-machines,  5,000  grain-drills, 
37,000  harvesters,  50,000  harrows,  70,000 
grain-cleaners,  and  65,000  cultivators.  This 
is  a  region  where,  one  generation  ago,  were 
only  the  wooden  plough,  the  sickle,  and  the 
flail. 

There  is,  to  be  sure,  still  a  dense  mass  of 
Russians  whose  yearly  habit  it  is  to  wait 
until  their  wheat  is  dead  ripe,  then  in  a  few 
days  of  frantic  labour  to  cut  down  half  of  it 
with  sickles,  leaving  the  rest  to  rot  in  the 
fields.     And    in    one    Caucasian    province, 


1 42        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

richer  in  its  soil  than  Iowa,  it  is  the  custom 
of  the  wandering  natives  to  move  every 
three  years  to  a  new  tract  of  land,  in  order 
to  avoid  the  trouble  of  fertilising  the  soil. 

"I  have  seen  farmers  ploughing  in  Russia 
with  a  piece  of  board,"  said  one  agent.  "And 
I  have  seen  their  thrashing  done  by  the  feet 
of  oxen."  But  the  new  idea  has  been 
planted  and  is  growing.  "  Russia  is  the 
land  of  to-morrow,"  said  another  expert. 
"We  have  been  educating  the  farmers  there 
for  seventeen  years,  yet  we  have  only 
scratched  the  surface.  We  who  have  lived 
among  the  Russian  peasants  expect  great 
things  from  them." 

They  have  succeeded,  then,  in  their 
campaign  for  the  supremacy  of  the  American 
reaper  —  the  Reaper  Kings  who  enlisted  the 
crowned  heads  and  the  nobility  of  Europe  in 
their  service.  By  1899  Europe  was  a  custo- 
mer at  our  farm  machinery  factories  to  the 
extent  of  twelve  millions  a  year.  This 
figure  was  doubled  in  1906,  and  is  now 
increasing  by  leaps  and  bounds.  All  told, 
this  one  industry  has  brought  us  $150,000,000 
of  foreign  money  in  less  than  fifty  years. 

Europe  has  sent  us  emigrants  —  twenty- 


The  American  Harvester   Abroad    143 

five  million  in  the  past  seventy-five  years. 
But  we  have  more  than  replaced  them  w^ith 
labour-saving  farm  machinery.  There  were 
in  1907  as  many  American  harvesters  in 
Europe  as  would  do  the  work  of  eleven 
million  men. 

If  our  foreign  trade  goes  ahead  at  its 
present  rate  of  speed,  we  shall  soon  have 
Europe  hopelessly  in  our  debt,  in  this 
exchange  of  men  for  machinery.  In  the 
past  four  years,  for  instance,  Europe  has 
sent  us  less  than  four  million  emigrants, 
but  we  have  sent  to  Europe,  in  that  time, 
enough  agricultural  automata  to  equal  the 
labour  of  five   million  men. 

And  this  means  much  to  Europe.  What 
with  her  4,500,000  soldiers  and  her  4,000,000 
public  officials,  she  has  to  serve  more  than 
twenty-five  million  meals  a  day  to  men  who 
are  non-producers.  She  has  to  clothe  and 
house  these  governmental  millions  and  their 
families.  How  could  she  do  this  if  it  were 
not  for  the  eleven  million  man-power  of  her 
American  harvesters,  and  the  half  billion 
bushels  of  reaper-wheat  that  she  can  buy 
from  other  countries  ^ 

France  must  have  our  harvesters  because 


144        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

she  has  been  short  of  men  since  the  wars  of 
Napoleon.  She  has  half  a  million  soldiers 
and  nine-tenths  of  a  million  officials.  Even 
now,  with  harvesters  clicking  merrily  in  all 
their  largest  grain-fields,  she  and  Germany 
cannot  feed  themselves.  Spain  at  one  time 
exported  wheat,  but  at  present  is  buying 
10,000,000  bushels  a  year.  England  grows 
less  than  a  quarter  as  much  as  will  feed  her 
people.  And  Russia  would  be  famine-swept 
from  end  to  end,  in  spite  of  her  30,000,000 
farmers  and  her  illimitable  acres,  if  she  had 
to  depend  wholly  upon  the  sickle  and  the 
scythe. 

But  the  story  is  by  no  means  ended  with 
Europe.  To-day  the  sun  never  sets  and  the 
season  never  closes  for  American  harvesters. 
They  are  reaping  the  fields  of  Argentina  in 
January,  Upper  Egypt  in  February,  East 
India  in  March,  Mexico  in  April,  China  in 
May,  Spain  in  June,  Iowa  in  July,  Canada 
in  August,  Sweden  in  September,  Norway  in 
October,  South  Africa  in  November,  and 
Burma  in  December.  It  is  always  harvest 
somewhere.  The  ripple  of  the  ripened  grain 
goes  round  the  world  and  the  American 
harvester  follows  it. 


The  American  Harvester  Abroad    145 

Even  from  this  incomplete  list  one  may 
begin  to  understand  how  tremendous  is  the 
task  that  the  International  Harvester  Com- 
pany has  assumed  in  undertakmg  to  cater  to 
the  farmers  of  fifty  countries  — to  adapt  itself 
to  their  various  customs. 

In  Holland,  for  instance,  where  the  grass 
is  short  and  thick,  a  mower  must  cut  as  close 
as  a  barber's  clippers;  and  in  Denmark, 
where  moss  grows  under  the  grass,  it  must 
cut  so  high  as  to  leave  the  moss  untouched. 
The  careful  Germans  of  Wisconsin  will  buy  a 
light  harvester,  such  as  the  "Milwaukee"; 
but  in  Argentina  a  light  machine  would  be 
racked  into  junk  in  a  season.  The  Argen- 
tinians, having  raised  cattle  for  generations, 
rush  to  the  harvest  in  cowboy  fashion.  It  is 
the  joy  of  their  lives  to  hitch  six  or  eight 
horses  to  a  big  "header,"  crack  the  long 
whip,  and  dash  at  full  gallop  over  the  rough 
ground. 

There  are  small  horses  in  Russia,  big  ones 
in  France,  oxen  in  India,  and  camels  in 
Siberia,  and  the  harvesters  must  be  adapted 
to  each.  Certain  backward  countries  demand 
a  reaper  without  a  reel.  Australia  must  have 
a    monster    machine    called    a    "stripper," 


146         The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

which  combs  off  the  heads  of  the  grain. 
California  and  Argentina,  because  of  their 
dry  climate,  can  use  "headers,"  a  combina- 
tion of  reaper  and  thrashing-machine.  And 
so  the  American  harvester  has  become  a 
citizen  of  the  world,  adopting  the  national 
dress  of  each  country. 

The  men  who  are  dealing  hand  to  hand 
with  these  problems  are  no  longer  the  Reaper 
Kings,  personally  introducing  their  harvesters 
through  royalty  and  nobility.  These  have 
been  succeeded  by  an  army  of  fifteen  hundred 
American  harvester  experts.  They  are  all 
salaried,  most  of  them  by  the  "Interna- 
tional"; and  their  work  is  to  put  the  farmers 
of  the  world  to  school.  They  are  the 
teachers  of  a  stupendous  kindergarten.  As 
an  example  of  the  rapidity  with  which  they 
are  sometimes  able  to  teach,  take  the  Philip- 
pines. Nine  years  ago  the  Filipinos  spent 
nothing  whatever  for  farming  machinery; 
in  1905  they  bought  $90,000  worth.  Even 
yet,  however,  they  do  not  raise  enough  rice  to 
feed  themselves;  and  although  half  of  them 
are  farmers,  only  one-twentieth  of  their 
land  is  cultivated. 

"Many  of  our  agents  are  now  living  in 


The  American  Harvester   Abroad    147 

Siberia  with  their  families,"  said  C.  S. 
Funk,  the  General  Pvlanager  of  the  Inter- 
national. "They  are  teaching  the  mujiks 
to  grow  wheat  and  harvest  it.  We  have 
similar  missionaries  in  South  Africa  and 
South  America  and  most  of  the  countries 
of  the  world.  Some  of  them  have  gone  as 
far  as  water  and  rail  would  carry  them, 
and  have  then  crossed  the  mountains  with 
their  machinery  on  the  backs  of  mules,  so 
that  they  might  teach  the  natives  how  to 
farm  on  the  American  plan.  All  told,  we 
have  more  than  a  thousand  such  missionaries 
in  foreign  countries." 

In  Chicago,  I  met  two  of  the  leaders  who 
are  in  control  of  this  army  of  teachers.  One 
was  a  strong-faced  young  Illinoisan  named 
Couchman,  who  handles  several  nations 
from  Hamburg;  and  the  other  was  a  cour- 
teous commercial  diplomat  named  La  Porte, 
who  supervises  France,  Spain,  Italy,  and 
Northern  Africa  from  his  office  in  Paris. 
Each  is  in  charge  of  several  hundred  Amer- 
ican mechanics,  who  are  exiled  from  home 
for  the  sake  of  our  harvester  trade. 

No  renown  comes  to  these  men.  No 
medals  are  pinned  upon  their  coats.     They 


148        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

are  only  one  regiment  in  the  great  pay- 
envelope  army  of  American  mechanics.  But 
they  are  on  the  firing-line  of  the  greatest 
battle  against  ignorance  and  famine  that 
has  ever  been  fought.  They  are  the  pioneers 
of  the  new  farmer.  To  show  the  world's 
peasantry  how  to  work  with  brains  and 
machinery,  to  bring  them  up  to  the  American 
farmer's  level  —  that  is  their  task.  What 
could  be  more  essentially  American,  or  more 
profitable  to  the  human  race  ? 

Many  European  farmers,  of  course,  are 
easily  up  to  the  Kansas  level;  but  the  vast 
majority  have  been  mistaught  that  the  path 
of  the  farmer  must  forever  be  watered  with 
sweat.  Many  of  them  are  so  cramped  by 
the  shackles  of  drudgery  that  they  cannot 
even  conceive  of  the  value  of  leisure. 

"Why  don't  you  use  a  scythe  .?  Then  you 
could  cut  twice  as  much,"  said  Horace 
Greeley,  who  was  deeply  interested  in  farm 
machinery  and  agriculture,  to  a  French 
peasant.  The  peasant  scratched  his  head. 
This  was  a  new  idea. 

"Because,"  he  answered  stodgily,  "I 
have  n't  got  twice  as  much  to  cut." 

The     quick,     handy    ways    of    American 


The  American  Harvester  Abroad    149 

farmers  are  seldom  found  in  other  countries. 
A  Swiss  will  put  a  big  stone  upon  a  land- 
roller,  to  give  it  weight,  and  then  walk 
behind  it.  To  ride  on  the  roller  himself 
does  not  occur  to  him.  A  South  German 
will  usually  take  the  reel  off  his  reaper,  and 
handle  the  grain  by  hand.  Operating  five 
levers  is  too;great  a  tax  upon  his  mind.  An 
Argentinian  wastes  his  pesos  by  hiring 
drivers  —  one  on  the  seat  and  another 
astride  one  of  the  horses. 

"A  Spanish  farmer  sent  for  me  on  one 
occasion,"  an  expert  told  me,  "and  I  found 
him  in  great  trouble.  He  had  bought  a  new 
harvester,  and  put  it  together  inside  his  barn, 
which  had  only  one  narrow  door.  He  had 
to  choose  between  taking  the  machine  to 
pieces  and  pulling  his  barn  down." 

Next  to  Russia,  in  the  list  of  countries  that 
this  army  of  experts  has  won  to  the  harvester, 
comes  Canada.  Like  the  trek  of  the  Boers 
into  the  Transvaal,  and  of  the  Japanese  into 
Korea,  there  has  been  a  trek  of  three  hundred 
thousand  American  farmers  into  Western 
Canada  —  into  the  new  forty-bushel-to-the- 
acre  wheat-land  of  Alberta.  Most  of  these 
emigrants  were  Minnesotans  and  Dakotans; 


150         The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

therefore  they  are  not  poor.  They  carried 
two  hundred  milHons  across  the  border.  And 
they  are  now  uprearing  a  harvester-based 
civihsation  in  a  vast  region  that  will  probably 
some  day  have  a  population  of  twenty-five 
million  people. 

That  billiard-table  country  —  Argentina  — ■ 
stands  third  among  the  foreign  patrons  of 
our  Harvester  Kings.  As  a  wheat  nation 
it  is  little  older  than  Alberta.  It  was  only 
about  eighteen  years  ago,  after  three  cen- 
turies of  revolution,  that  Argentina  settled 
down  to  raise  wheat  and  be  good. 

To-day  the  Argentinians  raise  more  wheat 
than  Germany,  and  their  country  has  be- 
come a  land  of  milk  and  honey.  It  is  a 
South  American  Minnesota,  but  eleven  times 
larger,  made  fertile  by  the  slow-moving 
Platte  River  —  a  hundred  miles  wide  when 
it  reaches  the  sea  —  which  moves  through 
its   plains  like  an  irrigating  canal. 

The  fourth  in  rank  of  our  harvester 
buyers  is  Australia,  which  is  now  sending  a 
yearly  tribute  of  more  than  a  million  to 
the  International  Company.  This  profitable 
reciprocity  between  Chicago  and  the  island 
continent   was    greatly   furthered   when   the 


f 


,'!fc>.^i« 


The  American  Harvester  Abroad     1 51 

International  bought  the  sixty- five-acre 
Osborne  plant,  at  Auburn,  New  York, 
which  had  been  remarkably  successful  in  its 
Australian,  as  well  as  its  French,  trade. 

Ride  along  any  of  the  historic  roadways 
of  the  world  and  you  will  see  the  painted 
automata  from  Chicago.  "On  the  road 
to  Mandalay,"  and  along  the  Appian  Way, 
and  the  trail  of  death  that  marks  the  flight 
of  Napoleon  from  Moscow,  you  will  find 
these  indispensable  machines.  They  are 
cutting  grass  and  wheat  on  the  battle-fields 
of  Austerlitz  and  Sedan  and  Waterloo. 

Scutari,  near  the  Adriatic  Sea,  bars  out 
foreign  machinery  by  law;  but  Roumania 
has  been  using  our  reapers  and  mowers  for 
more  than  fifteen  years.  Once  in  a  while  a 
reaper  is  sent  over  the  Andes  on  muleback; 
or  into  Central  China  via  the  wheelbarrow 
express.  And  now  that  there  are  irrigation 
pumps  at  the  base  of  the  Sphinx,^that  ancient 
female,  who  has  been  staring  at  sand-hills 
for  three  thousand  years  may  soon  look 
across  yellow  fields  in  which  American 
binders  are  clicking  cheerfully.  They  are 
for  sale,  too,  in  the  holy  cities  of  Rome, 
Jerusalem,    Mecca,    and    Benares  —  almost 


152        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

everywhere  but  Lhasa,  the  sacred  capital  of 
Tibet.  So  far  as  I  can  learn,  not  one  harvest- 
ing machine  of  any  kind  has  entered  that 
land  of  mystery  and  superstition.  In  a  few 
other  countries  harvesters  are  not  numerous. 
Very  few  have  been  sold  or  will  be  in  Japan. 
Here  are  the  smallest  farms  in  the  world. 
A  fork  and  a  pair  of  scissors  would  seem 
much  more  appropriate  implements  for  such 
tiny  plots.  Take  the  whole  arable  area 
of  Japan,  multiply  it  by  three,  and  you  will 
have   only   the   state   of  Illinois. 

In  India,  where  a  family  "lives"  on  fifty 
cents  a  week,  where  one  acre  makes  three 
farms  and  an  entire  farm  outfit  means  no 
more  than  a  ten-dollar  bill,  a  harvester  is 
still  almost  as  great  a  curiosity  as  an  Indian 
tiger  is  to  us.  One  of  the  harvester  agents 
told  me  of  a  rich  Hindoo  who  bought  a 
complete  set  of  American  farm  machines, 
and  had  them  set  in  a  row  near  his  house, 
apparently  regarding  them  only  as  curios 
from  a  foreign  land.  They  have  never 
been  used,  and  a  mob  of  starving  labourers 
reap  his  grain  by  hand  within  sight  of  his 
idle  machines. 

There  are  few  harvesters  in  Asia  Minor, 


The  American  Harvester   Abroad    153 

where  farmers  live  almost  like  groundhogs  — 
a  whole  family  in  one  windowless  hut  of 
burnt  clay.  And  there  are  fewer  still  in 
Africa,  where  five  million  idle  acres  of  fertile 
land  will  some  day  be  made  to  v/ork  for  the 
human  race. 

But  since  the  formation  of  the  big  Chicago 
company,  every  foreign  nation  is  being 
reached  and  taught  to  throw  away  its  reap- 
ing-hooks and  to  cut  its  grain  in  a  civilised 
way.  There  is  now  practically  no  great 
city  anywhere  in  which  a  farmer  cannot 
buy  one  of  the  handsome  red  harvesters 
that  have  done  so  much  to  give  a  "full 
dinner-pail"  to  the  civilized  nations. 

"The  world  is  mine  oyster,"  says  the 
International  Harvester  Company.  In  the 
first  five  years  of  its  career,  it  has  sent  to 
foreign  countries  920,000  harvesters  of  all 
sorts,  for  which  it  has  been  paid  $70,000,000. 
It  has  doubled  its  foreign  sales  and  now 
makes  two-third  of  the  harvesters  of  the 
world. 

What  with  the  profits,  and  the  big  orders, 
and  the  medals,  and  the  appreciation  of 
monarchs,  the  Harvester  men  have  found 
their  foreign  trade  from  the  first  a  business 


154        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

de  luxe.  In  fact,  one  of  the  principal 
reasons  why  they  quit  fighting  was  that  they 
might  handle  this  world  commerce  in  an 
organised  way. 

To-day  they  are  not  battling  with  one 
another  on  the  royal  farms  of  Europe,  like 
gladiators  who  make  sport  for  emperors. 
There  is  more  business  and  less  adventure. 
They  have  a  geography  of  their  own,  and 
have  divided  the  whole  world  into  eight 
provinces.  The  **  Domestic"  Department 
of  the  International  comprises  the  United 
States  and  Canada  and  is  managed  from 
Chicago.  Central  Europe,  with  Russia  and 
Siberia,  has  its  headquarters  at  Hamburg; 
Western  Europe  and  Northern  Africa  are 
handled  from  Paris;  Great  Britain  is  directed 
from  London;  South  America  from  Buenos 
Ayres;  Australia  from  Melbourne;  New 
Zealand  from  Christchurch;  and  Mexico 
from  Mexico  City.  Such  is  the  commercial 
empire  that  has  its  seat  at  the  foot  of  Lake 
Michigan. 

Other  countries  can  sell  us  automobiles 
and  bric-a-brac.  They  may  even  get  over 
our  tariff  wall  with  hay  and  cotton  and 
steel    and    lumber.     But    they    have    never 


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The  American  Harvester   Abroad    155 

dared  to  try  to  sell  us  farm  machinery. 
Every  harvester  in  the  United  States  was 
made   at   home. 

Either  one  of  the  two  immense  harvester 
plants  of  Chicago  is  larger  than  the  combined 
plants  of  England,  Germany,  and  France. 
France,  recently,  made  a  brilliant  dash 
toward  success  in  the  harvester  business.  M. 
Racquet,  a  journalist,  built  a  great  factory  at 
Amiens.  He  bought  the  best  American 
machinery.  He  allied  himself  with  a  sav- 
ings bank  and  sold  stock  to  the  farmers. 
He  was  protected  by  a  high  tariff.  But, 
alas  for  his  eloquent  prospectus!  His  selling 
force  was  too  small.  His  American  ma- 
chinery made  more  reapers  in  a  month  than 
he  could  sell  in  a  year.  And  in  1904  he  fell 
into  bankruptcy  under  a  debt  of  ten  million 
francs. 

An  American  harvester  is  practically  above 
competition  in  foreign  countries,  and  com- 
mands an  exceptional  price.  As  for  tariffs, 
there  is  a  wide  open  door  in  Great  Britain, 
Holland,  Norway,  Bulgaria,  Brazil,  Servia, 
and  South  Germany.  But  there  is  a  toll- 
gate  fee  of  $25  per  harvester  in  Hungary, 
and  $20  in  France;  and  for  lack  of  a  com- 


156        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

mercial  treaty,  the  tax  has  lately  been  in- 
creased in  part  of  Germany,  in  Hungary, 
Switzerland,  and  Rumania.  The  harvester 
companies  feel  that  they  have  a  substantial 
grievance  against  a  government  that  allows 
them  to  be  not  only  hazed  and  harried  at 
home  by  tariffs  on  raw  material,  but  driven 
out  of  foreign  markets  as  well.  "The  whole 
world  is  doing  business  on  a  single  street 
to-day,"  said  one  harvester  maker;  "but 
the  trouble  is  that  there  are  two  hundred 
tariff  toll-gates  along  that  street." 

In  self-defence,  against  these  tariffs,  the 
"International"  has  been  forced  to  build 
two  foreign  factories,  one  in  Canada  and  one 
in  Sweden.  The  Swedish  plant  is  a  small 
affair  as  yet,  making  rakes  and  mowers  only; 
but  the  Canadian  enterprise  supports  one- 
tenth  of  the  city  of  Hamilton,  and  holds  about 
half  the  Canadian  trade.  Its  worst  vexation, 
so  far  as  I  can  tell  from  a  hasty  visit,  is  a 
lack  of  Canadian  raw  materials.  Its  chains, 
bolts,  nuts,  and  canvas  aprons  corne  from 
Chicago,  its  steel  and  coal  from  Pittsburg, 
and  three-fourths  of  its  lumber  from  the 
Southern  states. 

The   country  that   perhaps   most  disturbs 


The  American  Harvester  Abroad    157 

the  dreams  of  our  harvester  companies,  is 
as  far  as  possible  from  being  one  of  the  great 
nations.  It  is  scarcely  a  country  at  all  — 
only  a  scrap  of  coral  reef  uprisen  at  the  foot 
of  Mexico  — Yucatan.  Yet  this  is  the  land 
on  which  the  United  States  depends  for 
binder  twine.  Manila  fibre  we  can  now 
get  from  our  new  co-Americans  —  the  Fili- 
pinos; but  there  is  never  enough  of  it  to 
supply  the  millions  of  self-binders.  Only 
sisal-hemp  yields  abundantly  enough.  And 
Yucatan  is  the  only  spot  in  the  world  where 
sisal  can  be  grown  in  commercial  quantities. 

Yucatan  is  smaller  than  South  Carolina, 
with  not  quite  the  population  of  Milwaukee. 
It  was  once  the  poorest  of  the  Central  Ameri- 
can states;  but  since  the  arrival  of  the  twine- 
binder  it  has  become  the  richest.  It  sells 
from  fifteen  to  eighteen  million  dollars'  wonh 
of  sisal  a  year,  and  the  United  States  buys  it 
all.  Three-fourths  of  this  money  is  clear 
profit;  2.nd  it  is  an  almost  incredible  fact  that 
the  forty  Sisal  Kings  of  Yucatan  have  a  larger 
net  income  than  the  owners  of  the  immense 
International  Harvester  Company. 

Roughly   speaking,   the   American   farmer 
pays  Yucatan  $12,000,000  a  year  for  string 


158        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

—  mere  string,  which  is  used  once  and  then 
flung  away.  It  is  an  extortion  and  a  waste, 
besides  being  the  only  un-American  factor 
in  the  whole  harvester  business. 

How  can  we  save  these  twelve  millions 
and  completely  Americanise  the  trade  ? 
This  is  a  problem  that  William  Deering  toiled 
at  for  twenty  years.  The  Harvester  Com- 
pany has  a  solution.     I  saw  it  at  St.   Paul 

—  a  new  factory,  which  twists  twine  from 
flax.  A  farmer's  son  named  George  H. 
Ellis  has  found  a  quick  and  cheap  way  to 
clean  the  flax  fibre;  and  at  the  time  I  visited 
the  factory  there  were  more  than  three 
hundred  workers  at  the  spindles.  Two 
million  pound  of  the  twine  were  sold  in  1906, 
so  that  the  enterprise  is  no  longer  an  experi- 
ment. This  means,  probably,  that  the  far- 
mer of  the  future  vs^ill  grow  his  own  twine. 
Instead  of  yielding  tribute  to  the  forty  Sisal 
Kings  of  Yucatan,  he  will  pay  no  more  than 
the  charges  of  the  railroad  and  the  factory. 
The  flax  will  be  his  own. 

Yucatan  is  the  only  cheap-labour  country 
that  has  been  enriched  by  the  harvester. 
Elsewhere  it  is  the  rule  that  the  common 
people  of  the  nation   must   reach   a   certain 


^   p 


The  American  Harvester  Abroad    159 

high  level  before  the  harvester  trade  can 
begin.  Where  human  labour  has  little  value, 
it  is  plainly  not  worth  saving. 

For  this  reason,  the  harvester  is  the 
best  barometer  of  civilisation.  It  cannot 
go  where  slavery  and  barbarism  exist.  It 
will  not  enter  a  land  where  the  luxury  of 
the  city  is  built  on  the  plunder  of  the  men 
and  women  who  work  in  the  fields.  Who- 
ever operates  a  harvester  must  not  only  be 
intelligent:    he  must  be  free. 

To  hundreds  of  millions  of  foreigners, 
the  United  States  is  known  as  "the  country 
where  the  reapers  come  from."  They  realise, 
too,  that  farm  machinery  represents  our 
type  of  genius,  that  it  springs  out  of  our 
national  life,  and  comes  from  us  as  inevi- 
tably as  song  comes  from  Italy  or  silk  from 
France. 

Why  ?  Read  the  history  of  the  United 
States.  This  was  the  first  country,  so  far 
as  we  can  know,  where  men  of  high  intelli- 
gence went  to  work  en  masse  upon  the  soil, 
and  under  such  conditions  as  compelled  them 
to  develop  a  high  degree  of  mechanical  skill. 
The  pioneer  American  farmer  had  to  be  his 
own  carpenter  and  blacksmith.     He  had  to 


l6o        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

build  his  own  house  and  make  his  own  har- 
ness. Consequently,  before  this  Farmers' 
Republic  was  two  generations  old,  the  reaper 
was  born  in  the  little  workshop  behind  the  barn. 

In  the  Old  World  every  occupation  stood 
alone  and  aloof.  The  mechanics  knew 
nothing  of  the  farm  and  the  farmer  knew 
nothing  of  the  workshop.  "Every  man  to 
his  trade,"  said  Europe,  Asia,  and  Africa. 
But  in  the  New  World,  where  trades  and 
classes  and  nationalities  were  flung  together 
in  a  heterogenous  jum.ble,  there  sprang  up 
a  race  of  handy,  inventive  farmers,  set  free 
from  the  habits  and  prejudices  of  their 
fathers.  They  were  the  first  body  of  men 
who  were  competent  to  solve  the  problem 
of  farm  machinery. 

And  so,  the  American  harvester  is  much 
more  than  a  handy  device  for  cutting  grain. 
It  is  the  machine  that  makes  democracy  pos- 
sible. It  reaches  the  average  man,  and  more 
—  it  pushes  the  ladder  of  prosperity  down  so 
far  that  even  the  farm  labourer  can  grasp 
the  lowest  rung  and  climb.  It  has  become 
one  of  our  national  emblems.  It  is  as  truly 
and  as  exclusively  American  as  the  Stars  and 
Stripes  or  the  Declaration  of  Independence. 


CHAPTER  V 

The  Harvester  and  the  American 
Farmer 

IF  THE  American  Farmer  went  out  of 
business  this  year  he  could  clean  up 
thirty  thousand  million  dollars.  And  he 
would  have  to  sell  his  farm  on  credit;  for 
there  is  not  enough  money  in  the  whole 
world  to  pay  him  half  his  price. 

Talk  of  the  money-mad  Trusts!  They 
might  have  reason  to  be  mad  if  they  owned 
the  farms,  instead  of  their  watered  stock. 
When  we  remember  that  the  American 
Farmer  earns  enough  in  seventeen  days 
to  buy  out  Standard  Oil,  and  enough  in 
fifty  days  to  wipe  Carnegie  and  the  Steel 
Trust  off  the  industrial  map,  the  story  of 
the  trusts  seems  like  "the  short  and  simple 
annals  of  the  poor." 

One  American  harvest  would  buy  the 
kingdom  of  Belgium,  king  and  all.  Two 
would  buy  Italy.  Three  would  buy  Austria- 
i6i 


1 62        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

Hungary.     And   five,   at  a   spot  cash   price, 
would    take    Russia    from    the    Czar. 

Talk  of  swollen  fortunes !  \Vith  the  setting 
of  every  sun,  the  money-box  of  the  American 
Farmer  bulges  with  the  weight  of  twenty- 
four  new  millions.  Only  the  most  athletic 
imagination  can  conceive  of  such  a  torrent 
of  wealth. 

Place  your  finger  on  the  pulse  of  your 
wrist  and  count  the  heart-beats;  one  —  two  — 
three  —  four.  With  every  four  of  those 
quick  throbs,  day  and  night,  a  thousand 
dollars  clatters  into  the  gold-bin  of  the 
American  Farmer. 

How  incomprehensible  it  would  seem 
to  Pericles,  who  saw  Greece  in  her  Golden 
Age,  if  he  could  know  that  the  yearly  revenue 
of  his  country  is  now  no  more  than  one  day's 
pay  for  the  men  who  till  the  soil  of  this 
infant   Republic! 

Or,  how  it  would  amaze  a  resurrected 
Christopher  Columbus,  if  he  were  told  that 
the  revenues  of  Spain  and  Portugal  are  not 
nearly  as  much  as  the  earnings  of  the  Ameri- 
can Farmer's  Hen! 

Merely  the  crumbs  that  drop  from  the 
Farmer's    table    (otherwise   known   as   agri- 


The  Harvester  and  American  Farmer    163 

cultural  exports),  have  brought  him  in 
enough  oi^  foreign  money  since  1892,  so  that 
he  could,  if  he  wished,  settle  the  railway 
problem  once  for  all,  by  buying  every  foot 
of  railroad  in  the  United  States. 

Such  is  our  New  Farmer  —  a  man  for 
whom  there  is  no  name  in  any  language. 
He  is  as  far  above  the  farmer  of  the  story- 
books, as  a  1908  touring-car  is  above  a 
jinrikisha.  Instead  of  being  an  ignorant 
hoe-man  in  a  barn-yard  world,  he  gets  the 
news  by  daily  paper,  daily  mail,  and  tele- 
phone; and  incidentally  publishes  seven 
hundred  trade  journals  of  his  own.  Instead 
of  being  a  moneyless  peasant,  he  pays  the 
interest  on  the  mortgage  with  the  earnings 
of  four  days,  and  his  taxes  with  the  earnings 
of  a  week.  Even  this  is  less  of  an  expense 
than  it  seems,  for  he  borrows  the  money 
from  himself,  out  of  his  own  banks,  and 
spends  the  bulk  of  the  tax  money  around  his 
own  properties. 

Farming  for  a  business,  not  for  a  living  — 
this  is  the  ??iotif  of  the  New  Farmer.  He  is 
a  commercialist  —  a  man  of  the  twentieth 
century.  He  works  as  hard  as  the  Old 
Farmer    did,    but    in    a    higher    way.     He 


164        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

uses  the  four  M's  —  Mind,  Money,  Ma- 
chinery and  Muscle;  but  as  Httle  of  the  latter 
as  possible. 

Neither  is  he  a  Robinson  Crusoe  of  the 
soil,  as  the  Old  Farmer  was.  His  hermit 
days  are  over;  he  is  a  man  among  men. 
The  railway,  the  trolley,  the  automobile 
and  the  top  buggy  have  transformed  him 
into  a  suburbanite.  In  fact,  his  business 
has  become  so  complex  and  many-sided, 
that  he  touches  civilisation  at  more  points 
and  lives  a  larger  life  than  if  he  were  one  of 
the  atoms  of  a  crowded  city. 

All  American  farmers,  of  course,  are  not 
of  the  New  variety.  The  country,  like  the 
city,  has  its  slums.  But  after  having  made 
allowance  for  exceptions,  it  is  still  true  that 
the  United  States  is  the  native  land  of  the 
New  Farmer.  He  is  the  most  typical  human 
product  that  this  country  has  produced, 
and  the  most  important;  for,  in  spite  of  its 
egotistical  cities,  the  United  States  is  still  a 
farm-based  nation. 

There  could  be  no  cloth-mills  without 
the  wool  and  cotton  of  the  farm;  no  sugar 
factories  without  beets;  no  flour-mills  with- 
out wheat;  no  beef-packing  industry  without 


The  Harvester  and  American  Farmer    165 

cattle.  The  real  business  that  is  now  swing- 
ing the  whole  nation  ahead  is  not  the  ping- 
pong  traffic  of  the  Stock  Exchanges,  but  the 
steady  output  of  twenty  millions  a  day 
from  the  fields  and  barn-yards.  If  this 
farm  output  were  to  be  cut  off,  the  towering 
skyscrapers  would  fall  and  the  gay  palace- 
hotels  would  be  as  desolate  as  the  temple 
of  Thebes. 

The  brain-working  farmer  is  the  man 
behind  prosperity.  That  is  the  Big  Fact 
of  recent  American  history.  It  is  he  who 
pays  the  bills  and  holds  up  the  national 
structure  in  the  whirlwind  hour  of  panic. 
Last  year,  for  instance,  while  banks  were 
tumbling,  the  non-hysterical  farmer  was 
quietly  gathering  in  a  crop  that  was  worth 
three  times  all  the  bank  capital  in  the  United 
States;  and  since  1902  he  and  his  soil  have 
produced  as  much  new  wealth  as  would 
support  Uncle  Sam,  at  his  present  rate  of 
living,    for    fifty   years. 

What  was  called  "McKinley  Prosperity" 
was  really  created  by  the  agricultural  boom 
of  1897.  There  had  been  a  general  crop 
failure  in  Europe,  and  the  price  of  wheat 
had  soared  above  a  dollar  a  bushel.     Other 


l66        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

nations  paid  us  twelve  hundred  millions 
for  farm  products;  and  this  unparalleled 
inpouring  of  foreign  money  made  us  the 
richest  and   busiest  nation   in   the  world. 

The  supreme  fact  about  the  American 
Farmer  is  that  he  has  always  been  just  as 
intelligent  and  important  as  anyone  else  in 
the  Republic.  He  put  fourteen  of  his  sons 
in  the  White  fiouse;  and  he  did  his  full  share 
of  the  working  and  fighting  and  thinking 
and  inventing,  all  the  way  down  from  George 
Washington   to   James   Wilson. 

He  climbed  up  by  self-help.  He  got  no 
rebates,  nor  franchises,  nor  subsidies.  The 
free  land  that  was  given  him  was  worthless 
until  he  took  it;  and  he  has  all  along  been 
more  hindered  than  helped  by  the  meddling 
of  public  officials. 

His  best  friend  has  been  the  maker  of 
farm-machinery.  But  this  is  a  family  matter. 
Four-fifths  of  the  Harvester  Kings  were 
farmers'  sons;  and  the  biggest  harvester 
factory  is  only  a  development  of  the  small 
workshop  that  always  stood  beside  the 
barn.  There  are  no  two  men  who  are  more 
closely  linked  together  by  the  ties  of  blood 
and  business  than  the   farmer  and  the  man 


The  Harvester  and  American  Farmer    167 

who  makes  his  labour-saving  machines. 
Neither  one  can  hurt  the  other  without 
doing   injury   to   himself 

The  inventor  of  the  modern  plough,  Jethro 
Wood,  was  a  wealthy  Quaker  farmer  of 
New  York  —  a  man  of  such  masterful 
intelligence  as  to  count  Clay  and  Webster 
among  his  friends.  The  late  James  Oliver, 
and  David  Bradley,  one  of  his  greatest  com- 
petitors, were  born  and  bred  near  the  fur- 
rowed soil. 

McCormick  built  his  first  reaper  in  a 
blacksmith  shop  on  a  farm.  So  did  John  F. 
Sieberling,  William  N.  Whiteley,  Lewis  Miller 
and  C.  W.  Marsh.  And  the  man  who  owned 
the  first  of  the  reaper  factories,  Dayton  S. 
Morgan,  grew  up  amid  the  stumps  of  a 
New  York  farm. 

The  American  Farmer'^has  always  grown 
ideas,  as  well  as  corn  and  potatoes.  That 
is  the  secret  of  his  prosperity.  It  was  out 
in  the  wheat-fields  where  the  idea  of  a  self- 
binder  flashed  upon  the  brain  of  John  F. 
Appleby;  where  Jacob  Miller  learned  to 
improve  the  thresher  and  George  Esterley 
to  build  the  header  and  Joseph  F.  Glidden 
to  invent  barb-wire. 


l68        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

Before  1850  there  was  some  progress 
among  farmers,  but  it  was  as  slow  as  mo- 
lasses in  Alaska.  They  were  free  and  inde- 
pendent, and  little  else.  They  had  poor 
homes,  poor  farms,  poor  implements. 

Then  came  the  gold-rush  to  California. 
What  this  event  did  for  farmers  and  the  world 
can  scarcely  be  exaggerated.  It  opened  up 
the  prairies,  fed  the  hungry  banks  with 
money,  lured  the  farm  labourers  westward, 
and  compelled  the  farmers  to  use  machinery. 

Three  years  later  the  Crimean  War  sent 
the  price  of  wheat  soaring,  and  the  farmers 
had  a  jubilee  of  prosperity.  Away  went 
the  log-cabin,  the  ox-cart,  the  grain-cradle, 
and  the  flail.  In  came  the  frame  house, 
the  spring  buggy,  the  reaper,  and  the  thresher. 
The  farmers  began  to  buy  labour-saving 
devices.  Better  still,  they  began  to  invent 
them. 

There  is  one  farm-bred  man,  named  R.  C. 
Haskins,  in  the  Harvester  Building  in  Chicago, 
who,  in  his  thirty  years  of  salesmanship, 
has  supervised  the  selling  of  ^275,000,000 
worth  of  harvesters  to  American  farmers. 
And  as  for  the  amount  of  money  represented 
by  our  farm  machinery  of  all  kinds,  now  in 


The  Harvester  and  American  Farmer    169 

use,  it  is  very  nearly  a  billion  dollars  —  a 
total  that  no  other  nation   can  touch. 

To  measure  American  Farmers  by  the 
census  is  novv^  an  outgrown  method,  for  the 
reason  that  each  farmer  works  with  the 
power  of  five  men.  The  farm  has  become 
a  factory.  Four-fifths  of  its  work  is  done 
by  machinery,  which  explains  how  we  can 
produce  one-fifth  of  the  wheat  of  the  world, 
half  of  the  cotton,  and  three-fourths  of  the 
corn,  although  we  are  only  six  per  cent, 
of  the  human  race. 

The  genie  who  built  Aladdin's  palace  in 
a  night  was  the  champion  hustler  of  the 
fairy  tale  countries.  But  he  was  not  so 
tremendously  superior  to  the  farm  labourer 
who  takes  a  can  of  gasolene  and  cuts  fifty 
cords  of  wood  in  a  day,  or  to  the  man  who 
milks  a  herd  of  sixty  cows  in  two  hours,  by 
machinery. 

To-day  farming  is  not  a  drudgery.  Rather 
it  is  a  race  —  an  exciting  rivalry  between 
the  different  States.  For  years  Illinois  and 
Iowa  have  run  neck  and  neck  in  the  raising 
of  corn  and  oats.  Minnesota  carries  the 
blue  ribbon  for  wheat,  with  Kansas  breath- 
less  in   second    place.     California    has   shot 


I/O         The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

to  the  front  in  the  barley  race.  Texas  and 
Louisiana  are  tied  in  the  production  of 
rice.  Kentucky  is  the  tobacco  champion; 
and  New  York  holds  the  record  for  hay 
and  potatoes. 

To  see  the  New  Farmer  at  his  best,  I 
went  to  Iowa.  No  other  State  has  invested 
so  much  money  —  sixty  millions  —  in  labour- 
saving  machinery,  so  it  can  fairly  claim  to  be 
the  zenith  of  the  farming  world. 

Here  there  are  tv/enty  thousand  women 
and  three  hundred  thousand  men  who  have 
made  farming  a  profession.  They  are  pro- 
ducing wealth  at  the  rate  of  five  hundred 
millions  a  year,  nearly  sixteen  hundred 
dollars  apiece.  How  ^  By  throwing  the 
burden   of  drudgery  upon   machines. 

Iowa  is  not  so  old;  she  will  be  sixty-two, 
this  year.  She  is  not  so  large;  little  England 
is  larger.  Yet,  with  her  hog-money  she 
could  pay  the  salaries  of  all  the  monarchs 
of  Europe;  and  with  one  year's  corn  crop 
she  could  buy  out  the  "Harvester  Trust," 
or   build   three   New  York  Subways. 

When  the  Indians  sold  Iowa  to  Uncle  Sam 
they  got  about  eight  cents  an  acre.  To 
give    the    price    exactly,    to    a    cent,    it   was 


The  Harvester  and  American  Farmer      ijl 

1^2,877,547.87.  When  this  money  was  paid, 
there  were  statesmen  who  protested  that  it 
was  too  much.  Yet  this  amount  was  less 
than  the  lowans  got  for  last  year's  colts; 
it  was  less  than  one  quarter  of  the  value  of 
the  eggs  in  last  year's  nests.  Every  three 
months,  the  Iowa  hen  pays  for  Iowa. 

Through  the  courtesy  of  Mr.  Harlan,  of 
the  Des  Moines  Historical  Society,  I  ob- 
tained the  addresses  of  nine  old  settlers, 
who  went  into  Iowa  with  ox-carts,  before 
1850,  and  who  are  still  living.  I  found 
that  every  one  of  them  had  remained  on  the 
land  and  was  prosperous.  The  poorest 
owned  ^7,000,  the  richest  $96,000;  and  their 
average  wealth  was  $36,000. 

These  fortunes  are  not  made,  as  in  France, 
by  sacrificial  economies.  The  lowan  is 
noted  as  a  high  liver  and  a  good  spender. 
Here,  for  instance,  is  the  menu  of  a  chance 
supper  I  enjoyed  at  the  home  of  an  Iowa 
farmer,  nine  miles  from  Des  Moines: 
Mashed  potatoes,  poached  eggs,  hot  biscuits, 
white  bread,  fresh  butter,  honey,  jelly, 
peaches  and  cream,  gooseberry  pie,  and 
good  coffee  —  all  served  on  china,  with 
fine    linen    tablecloth    and    napkins.     The 


172        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

man  of  the  house  was  the  son  of  a  rack- 
rented  Irish  immigrant,  who  had  been 
reared   "on  potatoes  and  salt,  mostly." 

I  found  one  young  county,  born  since  the 
Civil  War,  in  which  five  thousand  farmers 
now  own  property  worth  seventy-five  mil- 
lions. They  have  fourteen  thousand  horses, 
seventeen  thousand  sheep,  sixty  thousand 
rattle,  and  ninety  thousand  hogs.  In  the 
furnishing  of  the  homes  in  this  county,  so 
its  Auditor  informs  me,  more  than  twenty- 
five  thousand  dollars  have  been  spent  on 
the  one  item  of  pianos. 

In  a  small,  out-of-the-way  town,  called 
Ames,  I  came  upon  a  farmers'  college  —  a 
veritable  Harvard  of  the  soil.  Here,  on  a 
thousand  acres  which  fed  the  wild  deer  and 
buffalo  in  the  days  of  Andrew  Jackson,  is 
a  college  that  equals  Princeton  and  Vassar 
combined,  in  the  number  of  its  pupils.  Its 
farm  machinery  building  is  the  largest  of 
its  kind.  Five  professors  are  in  charge, 
and  it  is  a  curious  fact,  showing  how  new 
the  New  Farmer  is,  that  these  professors 
are  obliged  to  teach  without  a  text-book. 
As  yet,  there  is  no  such  thing  in  the  world 
as  a  text-book  on  farm  machinery. 


The  Harvester  and  American  Farmer     173 

The  lowans  pay  half  a  milhon  dollars  a 
year  to  sustain  this  college.  They  pay  it 
cheerfully.  They  pay  it  with  a  hurrah. 
Why  ?  Because  it  is  the  biggest  money- 
maker in  the  State.  One  little  professor, 
named  Holden  —  the  smallest  of  the  whole 
hundred  and  forty,  is  revered  by  the  lowans 
as  a  Kino-  Midas  of  the  cornfield.  He  has 
shown  them  how  to  grow  ten  bushels  more 
per  acre,  by  using  a  better  quality  of  seed. 
This  one  ideay  in  a  State  where  every 
fourth  dollar  is  a  corn  dollar,  meant  an 
extra  twenty  millions  last  year. 

First  in  corn,  first  in  farm  machinery, 
and  first  in  the  number  of  her  banks!  That 
is  Iowa.  There  are  a  few  of  her  villages 
that  have  no  banks,  but  they  are  conscious 
of  their  disgrace.  They  feel  naked  and 
ashamed.  In  all,  there  are  as  many  banks 
as  post-offices,  very  nearly;  and  they  are 
crammed  with  enough  wealth  to  build 
three  Panama  Canals. 

"Money  is  a  trifle  tight  just  now,"  said  an 
Iowa  banker.  This  was  last  September. 
"You  see,  at  this  time  of  year,  the  farm 
labourers  cause  a  drain  on  the  currency  by 
keeping  their  wages  in  their  pockets."     This 


174        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

surprising  fact  did  not  seem  surprising 
to  the  banker.  He  was  himself  bred  on 
the  soil  —  the  son  of  a  farm-hand  who  had 
become  a  rich  farmer.  But  to  the  finan- 
ciers of  Europe,  what  an  incredible  thing 
is  this  —  that  the  wages  of  the  farm-labourers 
should  sway  the  money  market  up  and  down. 
The  pride  of  Iowa  is  Des  Moines,  a  city 
of  farm-bred  people.  It  is  so  young  that 
some  of  its  old  men  remember  when  wolf- 
hunting  was  good  where  its  one  skyscraper 
stands  to-day.  It  has  no  ancient  history 
and  no  souvenirs.  A  little  while  ago  a  lot 
of  industrious  people  came  here  poor,  and 
now  they  are  prosperous  and  still  busy  — • 
that  is  the  story  of  Des  Moines  in  a  sentence. 

In  the  main  hall  of  the  five-domed  Capitol 
at  Des  Moines  is  a  life-sized  painting  of  a 
prairie  wagon,  hauled  by  oxen.  In  such 
a  rude  conveyance  as  this  most  of  the  early 
settlers  rolled  into  Iowa,  at  a  gait  of  two 
miles  an  hour.  But  there  are  no  prairie 
wagons  now,  nor  oxen.  Ten  thousand  miles 
of  railway  criss-cross  the  State,  and  make 
more  profit  in  three  months  than  all  the 
railways  of  ancient  India  made  last  year. 

Instead    of  being   tax-ridden    serfs,   these 


The  Harvester  and  American  Farmer     175 

lowans  pay  the  total  self-governing  cost  of 
their  Commonwealth  by  handing  over  the 
price  of  the  summer's  hay.  Instead  of  being 
the  prey  of  money-lenders,  they  have  made 
Des  Moines  the  Hartford  of  the  West,  in 
vv^hich  forty-two  insurance  companies  carry 
a  risk  of  half  a  billion.  And  so,  in  each 
one  of  its  details,  the  story  of  these  Corn 
Kings  is  staggering  to  a  mere  city-dweller, 
especially  to  anyone  who  has  cold  storage 
ideas   about  farmers. 

Big  Men,  too,  as  well  as  big  corn,  are 
grown  in  Iowa.  Here  is  a  sample  group  — 
half  educators  and  half  statesmen  —  John  B. 
Grinnell,  Henry  Smith  Williams,  Albert 
Shaw,  Newell  Dwight  Hillis,  Carl  Snyder, 
Emerson  Hough,  Hamlin  Garland,  Senators 
Allison  and  Dolliver,  Leslie  M.  Shaw,  John 

A.  Kasson,  Horace  Boies,  Governor  Albert 

B.  Cummins  and  our  Official  Farmer  — 
James  Wilson.  There  are  now  fifteen  hun- 
dred newspaper  men  in  Iowa.  (One  of 
them  ships  seven  carloads  of  magazines  a 
month.)  There  are  three  hundred  and 
fifty  architects,  two  thousand  engineers, 
five  thousand  doctors,  three  thousand  bankers 
and   brokers,  and  thirty  thousand  teachers. 


176        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

These  amazing  changes  have  taken  place 
within  the  memory  of  men  and  women  who 
are  now  alive. 

"I  can  remember  when  the  first  mowing- 
machine  was  made  in  our  county,"  said 
Governor  Cummins,  who  is  still  far  from 
being  a   man   of  years. 

"I  walked  eight  miles  through  the  forest 
and  sold  eggs  for  three  cents  a  dozen  and 
butter  for  four  cents  a  pound,"  said  John 
Cownie  —  a  well-known  figure  at  the  Des 
Moines  Capitol. 

One  short  half-century,  and  here  is  the 
v/hole  paraphernalia  of  a  high  civilisation  — 
a  fruitage  which  has  usually  required  the 
long  cultivation  of  a  thousand  years. 

And  Iowa  is  not  a  freak  State.  A  traveller 
hears  the  same  story  —  from  ox-cart  to 
automobile,  in  almost  every  region  of  the 
prairie  West.  The  various  States  are  only 
patches  of  one  vast  grassy  plain  where 

"  painted     harvesters,     fleet     after     fleet, 
Like  yachts,  career  through  seas  of  Vv^aving  wheat." 

"My  first  experience  with  the  'New 
Farmer,'  as  you  call  him,  was  in  Texas," 
said  a  Kansas  City  business  man.  "I  had 
taken  an  agency  for  harvesters  in  a  section 


The  Harvester  and  American  Farmer      1 77 

of  Texas  that  was  bigger  than  several  dozen 
Vermonts,  and  I  made  my  headquarters 
in  a  town  called  Amarillo.  The  first  morning 
I  went  into  the  bank  to  get  acquainted. 
While  I  was  there  in  came  a  big,  roughly 
dressed  man.  "'Come  here,  Bill,'  said  the 
banker.  'Maybe  you  want  some  farm  ma- 
chinery.' 

"'Maybe  I  do,'  said  the  big  fellow;  so  I 
gave  him  a  catalogue  and  went  on  talking 
with  the  banker. 

"Ten  minutes  later  the  big  fellow  looked 
up  from  the  catalogue  and  asked  —  'How 
much  do  you  want  for  ten  of  these  binders  ?* 
I  nearly  had  a  spell  of  heart  failure,  but  I 
gasped  the  price.  He  said  —  'all  right; 
send   'em  along.' 

"'Don't  you  worry  about  Bill's  credit,* 
said  the  banker,  seeing  I  looked  dazed. 
'He  has  more  than  $100,000  in  this  bank 
right  now.' 

"This  was  my  cue  to  get  busy  with  the 
big  farmer,  and  before  he  left  the  bank  he 
had  bought  a  thresher,  four  traction  engines 
and  half  a  dozen  ploughs." 

Harvesting  by  machinery  has  actually 
become    cheaper    than    the    ancient    method 


IjS        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

of  harvesting  by  slaves.  This  surprising 
fact  was  first  brought  to  the  notice  of  Euro- 
peans during  the  Chicago  World's  Fair, 
when  forty-seven  foreign  Commissioners  were 
taken  to  the  immense  Dalrymple  farm  in 
North  Dakota.  Here  they  saw  a  wheat- 
field  very  nearly  a  hundred  square  miles  in 
extent,  with  three  hundred  self-binders  click- 
ing out  the  music  of  the  harvest.  There 
were  no  serfs  —  no  drudges  —  no  barefooted 
women.  And  yet  they  were  told  that  the 
labour-cost  of  reaping  the  wheat  was  less 

THAN    A    CENT    A    BUSHEL. 

It  has  now  become  impossible  to  reap  the 
world's  wheat  by  hand.  As  well  might  we 
try  to  carry  coal  from  mines  to  factories 
in  baskets.  Merely  to  have  gathered  in  our 
own  cereal  and  hay  of  last  year's  growing, 
would  have  been  a  ten  days'  job  for  every 
man  and  woman  in  the  United  States, 
between  the  ages  of  twenty  and  twenty-six. 
But  even  if  it  had  been  possible  to  return 
to  hand-labour,  in  the  production  of  the 
world's  wheat,  the  extra  cost  would  have 
swollen,  last  year,  to  a  total  of  ^330,000,000 
—  so  I  am  told  by  a  Wisconsin  professor 
who  has  made  a  careful  study  of  the  costs 


The  Harvester  and  American  Farmer    1/9 

of  harvesting.  This  amount  is  more  than 
equal  to  the  entire  revenue  of  the  International 
Harvester  Company,  in  the  five  years  of  its 
existence. 

Roughly  speaking,  the  time  needed  to 
handle  an  acre  of  wheat  has  been  reduced 
from  sixty-one  hours  to  three,  by  the  use  of 
machinery.  Hay  now  requires  four  hours, 
instead  of  twenty-one;  oats  seven  hours, 
instead  of  sixty-six;  and  potatoes  thirty- 
eight  hours,  instead  of  one  hundred  and  nine. 

It  is  machinery  that  has  so  vastly  increased 
the  size  of  the  average  American  farm. 
In  India,  where  a  farmer's  whole  outfit 
can  be  bought  for  ten  dollars,  the  average 
farm  is  half  an  acre  or  less.  In  France  and 
Germany  it  is  five  acres.  In  England  it 
is  nine.  But  in  the  United  States  —  the 
home  of  farm  machinery,  it  is  one  hundred 
and  fifty  acres. 

Very  little  has  been  written  about  this 
stupendous  prosperity  of  American  farmers. 
Why  ?  Because  it  is  so  recent.  The  Era 
of  Big  Profits  began  barely  ten  years  ago. 
There  was  a  time  when  the  blue-ribbon 
New  Farmer  was  the  man  who  grew  wheat 
in    the    Red    River    Valley.     He    was    the 


l8o        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

aristocrat  of  the  West.  His  year's  work  was 
no  more  than  a  few  weeks  of  ploughing  and 
sowing,  and  a  few  days  of  harvesting.  Even 
this  was  done  easily,  sitting  on  the  seat  of  a 
machine  and  driving  a  team  of  splendid 
horses.  After  harvest,  he  cashed  in,  carried 
a  big  cheque  to  the  bank,  and  settled  down 
for  a  long  loaf  or  a  trip  to  the  old  homestead 
in  the  East. 

But  it  was  the  bad  year  of  1893  that  first 
put  the  farmers,  the  country  over,  on  the 
road  to  affluence.  Up  to  that  time  it  was 
their  usual  policy  to  depend  upon  a  single 
crop.  One  farmer  planted  nothing  but 
wheat;  another  planted  nothing  but  corn; 
a  third  nothing  but  cotton;  and  so  on.  But 
in  1893  the  prices  of  wheat,  corn,  and  cotton 
fell  so  low  that  the  farmers'  profits  were 
wiped  out.  This  disaster  set  the  farmers 
thinking;  and  in  four  years  they  had  changed 
over  to  the  new  policy  o^ Diversified  Farming. 

Instead  of  putting  all  their  vv^ork  upon  one 
crop,  they  planted  from  three  to  a  dozen 
different  crops  each  year.  They  manu- 
factured their  corn  into  cattle.  They  gave 
the  soil  a  square  deal  in  the  matter  of  fertilisa- 
tion.    They    learned    to    plant    better    seed 


The  Harvester  and  American  Farmer    l8l 

and  to  pay  attention  to  the  Weather  Bureau. 
They  studied  the  market  reports.  And, 
best  of  all,  they  swung  over  from  muscle  to 
machinery,  until  to-day  the  value  of  the 
machinery  on  American  farms  is  fully  a 
thousand  millions. 

All  this  amazing  progress  that  I  have  been 
describing  is  by  no  means  the  best  that  the 
New  Farmer  will  do.  It  is  merely  what 
he  has  done  by  the  aid  of  machinery.  What 
he  w^ill  do  by  the  aid  of  Science  remains 
to  be  seen. 

Scientific  agriculture  is  young.  It  has 
had  to  wait  until  machinery  prepared  the 
way,  by  giving  the  farmers  time  to  thmk, 
and  money  to  spend.  The  first  scientist 
who  took  notice  of  farming  was  the  French- 
man, Lavoisier.  He  found  out  the  composi- 
tion of  water  in  1783,  and  was  in  the  midst 
of  many  discoveries,  when  a  Paris  mob 
hustled  him  to  the  guillotine.  The  famous 
Liebig  next  appeared  and  founded  the  first 
agricultural  experiment  station.  Then  came 
Berthelot  —  the  father  of  synthetic  chemis- 
try, with  his  sensational  announcement  — ■ 
"The  soil  is  alive." 

To-day    the    New    Farmer    finds    himself 


l82        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

touched  by  Science  on  all  sides.  He  knows 
that  there  are  more  living  things  in  one  pinch 
of  rich  soil  than  there  are  people  on  the 
whole  globe.  He  knows  that  he  can  take 
half  a  dozen  handfuls  of  earth  from  different 
parts  of  his  farm,  mix  them  together,  send 
one  thimbleful  to  a  chemist,  and  find  out 
exactly  the  kind  of  crop  that  will  give  him 
the  best  harvest.  And  more,  now  that 
science  has  given  him  a  peep  into  Nature's 
factory,  he  can  even  feel  a  sense  of  kinship 
between  himself  and  his  acres,  because  he 
knows  that  the  same  e^lements  that  redden 
his  blood  are  painting  the  green  hues  on 
his  fields  and  forests. 

There  are  now  fifteen  thousand  New 
Farmers  who  have  graduated  from  agri- 
cultural colleges;  and  since  the  late  Professor 
W.  C.  Atwater  opened  the  first  American 
experiment  station  in  1875,  fifty  others  have 
sprung  into  vigorous  life.  There  is  also 
at  Washington  an  Agricultural  Department 
which  has  become  the  greatest  aggregation 
of  farm-scientists  in  the  world.  To  main- 
tain this  Department  Uncle  Sam  pays 
grudgingly  eleven  millions  a  year.  He  pays 
much    more    than    this    to    give    food    and 


The  Harvester  and  American  Farmer    183 

blankets  to  a  horde  of  lazy  Indians,  or  for 
the  building  of  two  or  three  warships. 
But  it  is  at  least  more  than  is  being  spent 
on  the  New  Farmer  in  any  other  country. 

Step  by  step  farming  is  becoming  a  sure 
and  scientific  profession.  The  risks  and 
uncertainties  that  formerly  tossed  the  farmer 
back  and  forth,  between  hope  and  despair, 
are  being  mastered.  The  Weather  Bureau, 
which  sent  lialf  a  million  warnings  last 
year  to  the  farmers,  has  already  become  so 
skilful  that  six-sevenths  of  its  predictions 
come  true.  In  Kansas,  wheat-growing  has 
become  so  sure  that  there  has  been  no  failure 
for  thirteen  years.  And  in  the  vast  South- 
West,  the  trick  of  irrigation  is  chano-ing  the 

'  o  too 

man-killing  desert  mto  a  Farmers'  paradise, 
where  there  is  nothing  so  punctual  as  the 
crops. 

Already  gasolene  engines  are  in  use 
among  the  New  Farmers.  The  International 
Harvester  Company  made  twenty-five  thou- 
sand of  them  last  year  at  Milwaukee,  without 
supplying  the  demand.  These  engines,  in 
the  near  future,  will  be  operated  with 
alcohol,  which  the  farmers  can  distil  from 
potatoes   at   a   cost   of  ten   cents   a   gallon. 


184        The  Romance  of  the  Reaper 

This  is  no  dream,  as  there  are  now  six 
thousand  alcohol  engines  in  use  on  the  farms 
of  Germany  alone. 

When  this  Age  of  Alcohol  arrives,  the 
making  of  the  New  Farmer  will  be  very 
nearly  complete.  He  will  then  grow  his 
own  power,  and  know  how  to  harness  for 
his  own  use  the  omnipotence  of  the  soil. 


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